Laura White
@laurakwhite.bsky.social
Colorado RNA biologist & tRNA enthusiast exploring the wild frontiers of nanopore direct RNA sequencing at the intrepid venn diagram of northern blots & machine learning.
Easy to donate blood or platelets at Children’s Hospital if you’re around the Anschutz Medical Campus in CO: giveblood.childrenscolorado.org/donor/schedu...
Children's Hospital Colorado - Donor Portal
giveblood.childrenscolorado.org
Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · last wk."On Monday, the Red Cross declared a national blood crisis for the second time ever in its history."
As a historian of smallpox vaccination who collects vaccination ephemera, this is quite literally something I sometimes have nightmares about
Ada Palmer@adapalmer.bsky.social · 2w agoHistorian friend was reading a civil war era letter in an archive, the letter said “In this envelope I include my smallpox scabs” and sure enough there they were. Had to call CDC for a hazmat team.
Ok first of all, I didn't know that NIH had a 3D print designs library, and second of all 🐸: 3d.nih.gov/entries/3DPX...
NIH 3D
NIH 3D
3d.nih.gov
At last, I can finally share my big news: I've been selected as one of the 50 scientist-enterpreneurs of Activate's 2026 cohort! At Andon Bio we're tackling an old problem -- why is protein expression so painfully unpredictable? -- with a new angle: 🔎 tRNA dynamics 🔍. activate.org/news/activat...
Activate Welcomes 50 New Fellows to Cohort 2026
Meet the 41 Hard Tech Companies Across 5 Activate Communities
activate.org
Domain swap is a staple in protein engineering. But instead of trial & error, can we predict an ideal crossover w/ comp modeling? Happy to share a wonderful collaboration w/ Jürgen @lassak-lab.bsky.social at my alma mater LMU Munich to convert a protein ligase to an aaRS for β amino acids t.ly/lNpVw
When I explain to peeps how much we do in research labs for how few $$, they simply don’t believe me. I once explained it to a famous person from Pixar, he looked me square in the eye and said “You mean all the cancer, vision, and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be %#ing kidding me!”
Jason Rasgon@vectorgen.bsky.social · last mo.The NIH is an ENORMOUS bargain for the American people. Do folk think that private industry will do the background slog work for drug discovery for 250K direct costs?
TIL that from 1961 to 2009 there was a bowling alley in Antarctica (at McMurdo station) and it used penguin-themed pins.
Taking our first steps towards sequencing the extracellular matrix by “Intact and single-molecule analysis of heparan sulfate” from @phristov.bsky.social in the lab, in collaboration with Miten Jain's lab. "HS-nano-seq" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Antler tissue is the fastest-growing animal tissue. It can grow at a rate up to 2 cm/day in some species. Despite this very high cell division rate, there are remarkably cancer-free, a paradox that biologists continue to study. Elk can grow a whole 40 lb (18 kg) set in less than 6 months. #mammals
My version of this for how fast airplane technology developed? Orville Wright flew both the Wright Flyer and a Lockheed Constellation
Our new paper was, by definition, an adventure: stepping outside of our comfort zone, embracing the unknown, and engaging in activities where the outcome is uncertain. Includes discovery of a new species and working with a Native American tribe to name it… 🧵👇 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Comparative Analysis of Stress Adaptation in the Yeast Microbiome of Cactus
Yeasts and related fungi isolated from cacti or nearby non-cactus plants were characterized phenotypically and genomically, revealing differences that hint at modes of adaptation to the cactus host.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
I love this illustration for instance, from The News-Times, Saturday January 14th, 1978.
TusDCB-mediated tRNA sulfur modification is required for virulence and intestinal fitness in enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli 🦠 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
TusDCB-mediated tRNA sulfur modification is required for virulence and intestinal fitness in enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli | Infection and Immunity
Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) is a well-known foodborne pathogen that causes not only severe hemorrhagic diarrhea but also life-threatening complications such as hemolytic uremic syndrome…
journals.asm.org
32 grants on 6/3 and nothing since then. A bit odd, to say the least.
Noam Ross@noamross.net · 2mo agoNSF seems to have stopped making new awards last week. There have been no new awards from any directorate since Weds, June 3. Even with the slow pace of new awards this year, there's been a consistent trickle. Something stopped the flow. grant-witness.us/funding_curv... #NSF 🧪
Matt and his growing army of talented junior colleagues will not and perhaps cannot stop coming up with new ways to dissect the complex mechanisms by which cells send RNAs to different subcellular locations. It’s been fun watching Charlie Moffat in his lab systematically chip away at this story.
Matthew Taliaferro@jmtali.bsky.social · 2mo agoNew paper! How do RNAs "know" where to go inside a cell? We dug into the sequence elements that route RNAs to the right place. It turns out that, in mammals, they're surprisingly massive (>200 nt), multipartite, and wonderfully complicated. 🧵
the itsy bitsy sisyphus put death in a lock pissed off the gods who handed him a rock cursed for all time to roll it up a hill but the rock just falls back down so he is rolling still
Sitting on some great news I can’t share publicly yet, so in the meantime, here’s a happy dog for your Friday.
This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...
Researchers say the Trump administration is finding new ways to punish science
Even with federal grants largely restored, scientists say the Trump administration is still preventing those funds from reaching them. The consequences, they say, are already becoming clear.
npr.org
#ASGCT2026 had a dedicated area with rescue puppies you could play with and I hereby demand every science conference has this going forward. @darthbluesky.bsky.social
Imagine pulling up next to what you think is the driver’s side of this little truck.
'Beltsville Agricultural Research Centre', Maryland - I was privately commissioned to memorialise the BARC by a past employee after learning it will be shut down by the USDA after over 100 years of research. They wanted to focus of this aerial embroidery to be the field plots... 1/3 (see thread)
a dad next to me in line for pizza is explaining, upon preteen prompting, who Chuck Norris is: “what do you mean then he went crazy, dad?” “uhh he just got very political. but anyway you’ve probably heard some memes about him” “like what?” this guy spent his whole 20s preparing for this moment
not many people know this, but Barilla has a line of 3D printed pasta it sells mostly to the fine dining industry. I don't want the pasta. I want the pasta printer
I know I’m in Georgia because a TSA agent just held up an empty Pepsi bottle that came loose in the scanner and asked the line whose Coke it was.
This sign raises many questions, which probably should be answered by the sign but aren't
