TODAY in @dallasnews.com: Read more about McBrayer Lab's #relentlessdiscovery in @science.org, with a cameo from CRI Genetic & Metabolic Disease Program Director @rjdlab.bsky.social 🧪

The Dallas Morning News@dallasnews.com · 6d ago

A new study from Dallas scientists suggests a mutated gene leads to severe neurological impairment, and points towards a potential treatment strategy.

🚨 Deadline extension: Register until July 10 for the #FrankfurtCancerConference 2026! ✨ Highlights: 9 scientific sessions, 32 excellent speakers, short talks, posters, lots of time to connect! 👇 Check out our program and register here: www.frankfurtcancerconference.org

👏👏 On a roll with #MotivationMonday & another successful dissertation defense! Congrats to @haozhulab.bsky.social & @rjdlab.bsky.social lab grad student Roger Liang. Dr. Liang is headed back to medical school to finish up his M.D. Onward! #relentlessdiscovery 🧪

Very happy to share our new paper. Together with our wonderful collaborators, we found that L-2-HG, a metabolite often viewed as “toxic,” also has an essential physiological function in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mitochondrial l-2-hydroxyglutarate is a physiological signalling metabolite - Nature

l-2-Hydroxyglutarate is identified as a legitimate physiological signalling metabolite, and control of its levels is essential for postnatal growth and survival and correct renal development and funct...

nature.com

Advancing our understanding of how metabolism shapes neuronal development: doi.org/10.1172/JCI1... @rjdlab.bsky.social & team generated neural progenitor cells from patients, finding that L2HG epigenetically activates MYC to impair neuronal differentiation—and the effect is reversible

We already thought @haozhulab.bsky.social hung the (liver-shaped) moon🌙 & now his #relentlessdiscovery is promulgated. Check out Chp 6, "When Our Bodies Autocorrect," p140 to read how somatic mutations could give us "hope." Great topic, @roxannekhamsi.bsky.social! 🧪 Watch out #booktok 🤓

Roxanne Khamsi@roxannekhamsi.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This week marks the release of my book Beyond Inheritance 🎉 📖 . It tells the stories of patients with mysterious ailments who have been saved by doctors' new understanding of genetics. And how whales can teach us about preserving our DNA as we age. Available as book & audiobook: tinyurl.com/5yjsr97n

I am so grateful for this honor - grateful to my mentors, lab, and family. Thank you @seanjmorrison.bsky.social for your support. And how great to be elected with some very good friends and two awesome UTSW colleagues, Elizabeth Chen and Joel Elmquist. Feeling very fortunate today.

Children's Research Institute at UT Southwestern@cri-utsw.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🌟From the desk of @seanjmorrison.bsky.social: It's a great day for CRI, which now has 2 @nasonline.org members. Congratulations to @rjdlab.bsky.social and his laboratory on this recognition for the quality and impact of their work! #relentlessdiscovery 🧪 cri.utsw.edu/deberardinis...

This kind of stable, sustained support can transform a career: @hhmi-science.bsky.social's #FreemanHrabowski Scholars Program offers early career faculty up to $10M over 10 yrs, plus salary & benefits. Postdoc? This year's competition has a program for you too. Applications open 11/3! bit.ly/4vhC0LA

Early Career Faculty Program | Freeman Hrabowski Scholars | HHMI

The Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program offers comprehensive support to outstanding early career faculty committed to scientific excellence in their own research, and to fostering labs that expand the ...

bit.ly

New paper from Dr. Wen Gu on the impact of L-2-hydroxyglutarate deficiency on neural stem cell function and neuronal differentiation. Interesting connection between an IEM and chronic oncogene activation. Thanks to Dr. Bushra Afroze and her patients for participating. www.jci.org/articles/vie...

Incredible chance to learn about genetics, from the fundamentals to the latest science. I attended this course when I was a PhD student in the 90s and have lectured in it for the last dozen or so. And science aside, there's nowhere better to be in late July than Bar Harbor, ME. See you there.

#RareDiseaseDay2026: “think of zebras (rare diseases) when you hear hoofbeats.” On Feb 28, we wear stripes to recognize patients with rare diseases and support rare disease research in CRI and the McDermott Center at UT Southwestern. Thanks to the Rare Disease CoE for all you do for these patients.

My first co-authored paper appeared 30 years ago today. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8626737/

Human enteric defensins. Gene structure and developmental expression - PubMed

Paneth cells, secretory epithelial cells of the small intestinal crypts, are proposed to contribute to local host defense. Both mouse and human Paneth cells express a collection of antimicrobial proteins, including members of a family of antimicrobial peptides named defensins. In this study, data fr …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Great time in Boston, as always! Thanks for the invitation!

BIDMC Cancer Center@bidmc-cancercenter.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Live from our Cancer Research Institute seminar: @rjdlab.bsky.social. His lab studies how oncogenic control of #metabolism impacts tumor growth and progression. Using isotope tracers, he assesses tumor metabolism in vivo and measures mitochondrial function in purine metabolism. #CancerResearch

www.cancermoleculartherapeutics.org/event-detail...

CMTRA 2026 Annual Meeting | Cancer Molecular The

Please use Join us for the CMTRA 2026 Annual Meeting at the spectacular Snowbird Mountain Resort in the Wasatch Mountains of Salt Lake City, Utah. Engage in insightful discussions, network with indust...

cancermoleculartherapeutics.org

That’s a wrap on the past 12 months, with even more #relentlessdiscovery to come in 2026. cri.utsw.edu/discoveries/ @seanjmorrison.bsky.social @rjdlab.bsky.social @haozhulab.bsky.social 🧪 #stemcells #regeneration #CancerResearch #metabolism #NYE2025 #NYE2026

ONLINE NOW in @pnas.org: Agathocleous Lab, collaborators discover why humans, some animals may need intermittent vitamin C deficiency: to survive parasite infections. 🧪 Read more ⬇️ cri.utsw.edu/loss-of-vita... #relentlessdiscovery

Loss of vitamin C synthesis protects animals from schistosomiasis - Children's Medical Center Research Institute (CRI) | Dallas Texas

Agathocleous Lab, collaborators discover vitamin C deficiency can benefit animals by depriving vitamin from parasitic worms DALLAS – Dec. 23, 2025 – Scientists at Children’s Medical Center Research In...

cri.utsw.edu

Just a nice lab happy hour before the holidays

An excellent opportunity for summer undergraduate research - the Cech Fellows Program! Applications due in 10 days: www.hhmi.org/programs/cec...

Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (REU) | Cech Fellows | HHMI

The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.

hhmi.org

A true legend. www.bcm.edu/about-us/lea...

In Memoriam: Bert W. O'Malley, M.D.

In Memoriam: Bert W. O'Malley, M.D....

bcm.edu

Regulated decay of microRNAs plays a critical role in controlling body size in mammals! Check out our new paper in @genesdev.bsky.social and see thread previously posted with our pre-print 👇 for more info. Congrats to Collette LaVigne, Jaeil Han, and all authors! genesdev.cshlp.org/cgi/content/...

Josh Mendell@mendell-lab.bsky.social · last yr.

I am pleased to present our latest pre-print describing our identification of the long-sought triggers for target-directed microRNA degradation (TDMD) of miR-322 and miR-503, work led by Collette LaVigne and Jaeil Han. For more info, read on! 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here's the beautiful paper from @chembiohub.bsky.social reporting NUDT5's role in purine synthesis. I cannot emphasize enough how gracious and open these authors were when we all realized we were working on the same mechanism.

ChemBioHub - Huber Lab@chembiohub.bsky.social · 9mo ago

New in @science.org 🧬 What if an enzyme you thought you knew turned out to control metabolism in a completely new way? We found that NUDT5 acts as a molecular handbrake on purine synthesis, reshaping how cells make DNA building blocks and respond to cancer drugs. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/New paper from Zheng Wu, Phong Nguyen et al. @cri-utsw.bsky.social shows how cells balance the two pathways that produce purine nucleotides: de novo purine biosynthesis (DNPB) and purine salvage. The surprising mechanism involves NUDT5, a Nudix hydrolase www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

NUDT5 regulates purine metabolism and thiopurine sensitivity by interacting with PPAT

Cells generate purine nucleotides through de novo purine biosynthesis (DNPB) and purine salvage. Purine salvage represses DNPB to prevent excessive purine nucleotide synthesis through mechanisms that ...

science.org

Excited to share our work @nature.com! Postdoc @mariopalma.bsky.social, with major contributions from @retickerflynn.bsky.social and collaborators, discovered melanoma cells in lymph nodes gain a targetable FSP1 dependency that limits progression. #TeamFSP1 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Identification of a new, autosomal dominant form of familial partial lipodystrophy from Abhimanyu Garg and team. This disease is caused by a recurrent variant in ACAA2, which encodes an enzyme in mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation. www.jci.org/articles/vie...

We moved the RJDLab potluck to Halloween this year. Thanks to Gaby Cano for organizing! (And decorating).

Congrats to all Damon Runyon's SPARK Scholars, including our own scholar Imani Williams who is studying cancer metabolism. Thank you Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation @damonrunyon.org for supporting this great initiative. www.damonrunyon.org/news/entries...

❤️

Vikram Paralkar@paralkarlab.bsky.social · 10mo ago

This is beautiful! 🥲

Remarkable new human proteome-wide effort to predict protein-protein interactions using coevolutionary signals and deep learning. From Qian Cong in the Eugene McDermott Center at UT Southwestern. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Predicting protein-protein interactions in the human proteome

Protein-protein interactions (PPI) are essential for biological function. Coevolutionary analysis and deep learning (DL) based protein structure prediction have enabled comprehensive PPI identificatio...

science.org

Thank you @cri-utsw.bsky.social postdocs!

Children's Research Institute at UT Southwestern@cri-utsw.bsky.social · 11mo ago

We have the best postdocs! We appreciate you being a critical part of our CRI team to help discover the treatments of tomorrow. #npaw2025 #npaw #relentlessdiscovery 🧪

I’m thrilled to share that I have been awarded an NIH/NIGMS K99 Pathway to Independence Award. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has supported me along the way, especially @rjdlab.bsky.social @cri-utsw.bsky.social