Finding actionable drug targets is a primary bottleneck in human longevity research. Through Impetus Grants, we’ve been funding researchers like Ryan Dhindsa @ryandhindsa.bsky.social from the Baylor College of Medicine @bcmhouston.bsky.social to make progress in exactly that 👇

Last December, @wired.com published a provocative article arguing that Parkinson's disease is driven by environmental chemicals, not genetics, and that decades of genetics research have been a dead end. I wrote about why that framing is patently wrong, and why it matters now more than ever.

Parkinson's disease does not pick sides

How pitting genetics against epidemiology threatens progress in Parkinson's research

thecausalgene.substack.com

My lab at MSKCC in New York is hiring for two positions. Join us at the frontier of functional genomics, studying fibroblast state transitions, combinatorial genetics, and ECM in disease. Please share with anyone who might be a good fit! (Mustache not required.)

#GeneticVariation influences how #EBV is controlled, and poorer viral control is linked with several long-term illnesses. @ryandhindsa.bsky.social @bcmhouston.bsky.social @caleblareau.bsky.social @mskcancercenter.bsky.social @astra-zeneca.bsky.social @nature.com blogs.bcm.edu/2026/02/03/f...

These 22 genes could put people at risk of long-term health conditions following common viral infection.

Differences in these genes help explain why Epstein-Barr Virus can have lasting health effects in some people but not others.

blogs.bcm.edu

This was a fun and rewarding collaboration! A great example of extracting biological signal from data hiding in plain sight

Caleb Lareau@caleblareau.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Today in @nature.com, we describe how discarded reads in biobank-scale WGS can help resolve the genetic predictors and consequences of Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) infection. Wonderful working with @ryandhindsa.bsky.social @sherrynyeo.bsky.social @erinmayc.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Baylor College of Medicine @bcmhouston.bsky.social, @astra-zeneca.bsky.social, @mskcancercenter.bsky.social identified genes that increase the risk of developing chronic conditions after #viralInfection. #EBV @nature.com @ryandhindsa.bsky.social #DuncanNRI #TexasChildrens www.bcm.edu/news/dna-res...

DNA research uncovers 22 genes that could put people at risk of long-term health conditions following common viral infection

Baylor College of Medicine researchers are part of a collaborative research group with AstraZeneca and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center that have...

bcm.edu

EBV infection is a major detriment to human health. @ryandhindsa.bsky.social, Slavé, and I discussed the impact of this work with @bloomberg.com and some future outlooks www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Scientists Inch Closer to Solving the ‘Kissing Disease’ Mystery

Scientists have identified 22 genes that increase the risk of conditions like lupus, stroke, and rheumatoid arthritis in patients who’ve caught the virus behind mono, an illness known as the “kissing ...

bloomberg.com

Our latest story is now on bioRxiv. We present PETRA, a new method for deciphering how sequence variants impact gene regulation at scale. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... This work was led by Magdalena Armas Reyes, a @crick.ac.uk PhD student until very recently. Congrats, Dr. Armas! 🧵 1/9

New preprint on technologies to scale up CRISPR screens. We use them to map 665,856 pairwise genetic perturbations and outline a path to comprehensive interaction mapping in human cells. We also introduce an approach for cloning lentiviral libraries with billions of elements.

Our latest preprint revisits the classic model of mutation-selection balance. Do human recessive genes fit Haldane's 100-year old model? This work is by the wonderful @jonj-udd.bsky.social, and co-mentored by @jeffspence.github.io www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Allele Frequencies at Recessive Disease Genes are Mainly Determined by Pleiotropic Effects in Heterozygotes

The classic theory of mutation-selection balance predicts the equilibrium frequency of genetic variation under negative selection. The model predicts a simple relationship between the total frequency ...

biorxiv.org

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

plsRT: Looking for a motivated postdoc! Join us at @bcmhgsc.bsky.social to explore the mosaic & somatic landscape of the human genome: structural variants, methylation, and all things @smahtnetwrk.bsky.social If you like long reads, complex variants & methylation come talk to me!

🚀 Very excited to share the first major work from my PhD!! We combined MPRA and CRISPRa in excitatory neurons to test and validate cis-regulation therapies for hundreds of haploinsufficient neurodevelopmental disorder genes. 🧬🔬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A new Nature Medicine study analyzing health records from >100 million people in the US offers compelling evidence that reactivation of varicella-zoster virus (VZV) ,the same virus that causes chickenpox and shingles may contribute to dementia risk. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Varicella-zoster virus reactivation and the risk of dementia - Nature Medicine

Large-scale longitudinal health records reveal consistent association of varicella-zoster virus reactivation with dementia.

nature.com

Neat trick if you polycolonal ab's suck. Incubate them with fixed cells with a KO of your protein of interest, then spin. Protocol here: www.med.upenn.edu/markslab/ass... I was amazed how well it worked on first try (I'm sure that I can completely eliminate unspecific bands) #WesternBlot #cellsky

Stem-cell models provide evidence that viral DNA sequences that entered the human genome in the past were repurposed to aid early stages of embryonic development go.nature.com/4nRJyA4

Ancient viral DNA in the human genome shapes early development

Stem-cell models provide evidence that viral DNA sequences that entered the human genome in the past were repurposed to aid early stages of embryonic development.

go.nature.com

Our latest research is out today on ‪@medrxivpreprint.bsky.social: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... Saturation genome editing of BRCA1 across cell types accurately resolves cancer risk. Led by the amazing Phoebe Dace. This one’s packed full of data, so check out the paper. Quick highlights… 🧵 1/n

Saturation genome editing of BRCA1 across cell types accurately resolves cancer risk

Germline pathogenic BRCA1 variants predispose women to breast and ovarian cancer. Despite accumulation of functional evidence for variants in BRCA1 , over half of reported single-nucleotide variants (...

medrxiv.org

Nature research paper: Whole-genome sequencing of 490,640 UK Biobank participants go.nature.com/46EtTyW

Whole-genome sequencing of 490,640 UK Biobank participants - Nature

A study reports whole-genome sequences for 490,640 participants from the UK Biobank and combines these data with phenotypic data to provide new insights into the relationship between human variation and sequence variation.

go.nature.com

Excited to share a new preprint from the lab with @ryandhindsa.bsky.social ! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Led by @sherrynyeo.bsky.social, @erinmayc.bsky.social, and friends, we continue our journey to find viral DNA in our favorite place-- the overlooked and discarded reads in existing data! 1/

Neuron programming! Pro-neural TFs + 480 morphogen conditions + scRNA-seq --> Diverse iN subtypes of forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain, spinal cord, and PNS. @hsiuchuanlin.bsky.social‬ @jasperjanssens.bsky.social‬ and Treutlein Lab! @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #NGN2 #ASCL1

Drop by poster B0008 today to learn about genetic risk factors for retinal detachment! We found that variants in VSX2 were associated with an increased risk of retinal detachment in the UK Biobank. Shout out to my PIs Ben Frankfort and @ryandhindsa.bsky.social! @arvoinfo.bsky.social #visionscience

It’s out! The first paper from my postdoc – and first from the @bhadurilab.bsky.social – is now live @natneuro.nature.com . 🧠✨ Using a new meta-atlas generation strategy, we identified functional gene networks that more fully explain how cell types are formed in the human cortex. (1/13)

Nature Neuroscience@natneuro.nature.com · last yr.

Parallel meta-analyses of the human cortex in development (seven datasets) and adulthood (16 datasets) generated over 500 gene co-expression networks that can describe mechanisms of cortical development, centering on peak stages of neurogenesis 🧠🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our MPAC preprint, a scalable ensemble of ML models for genome-wide non-coding variant effect prediction and our findings from 575M predictions across databases including @ukbiobank.bsky.social, GTEx, ClinVar, COSMIC, and @gnomad-project.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 We’re hiring postdocs! Join our lab in Houston to study human disease using stem cell models, functional genomics, and big genomic data. Wet & dry lab backgrounds welcome. Please email me if you're interested (ryan.dhindsa@bcm.edu) or apply directly: jobs.bcm.edu/job/Postdoct... 📩

Excited to share our latest study published in @naturecomms.bsky.social! We demonstrate that broad ancestral representation dramatically improves our ability to detect disease-associated regions of the genome. Outstanding work was led by @alexander-han.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Diverse ancestral representation improves genetic intolerance metrics - Nature Communications

Here the authors show that expanding global ancestry diversity in genomic datasets improves detection of genomic regions intolerant to variation, identifying areas more likely to harbor disease-causin...

nature.com

Our paper describing ITSN1 as a novel risk gene for Parkinson’s disease was published in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social today! We found that rare loss-of-function variants in ITSN1 increase Parkinson's disease risk by 10-fold www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Haploinsufficiency of ITSN1 is associated with a substantial increased risk of Parkinson’s disease

Spargo et al. analyzed whole-genome sequence data from ∼900,000 individuals and found that protein-truncating variants in ITSN1 confer a ∼10-fold increased risk of Parkinson’s disease. Functional stud...

cell.com

Dr. @ryandhindsa.bsky.social et al linked variants in the gene #ITSN1 to a significantly elevated risk of #ParkinsonsDisease, paving a new way for treatments. @cellpress.bsky.social @bcmhouston.bsky.social #DuncanNRI @astrazeneca.bsky.social www.bcm.edu/news/itsn1-g...

ITSN1 gene linked to risk of Parkinson’s disease

A new study published in Cell Reports reveals a breakthrough discovery linking genetic variants in the gene ITSN1 to a significantly elevated risk of Parkinson’s...

bcm.edu

Now online! Safeguarding the future of biomedical science in the United States

Safeguarding the future of biomedical science in the United States

NIH’s abrupt decision to cap indirect cost reimbursement at 15% threatens the critical infrastructure supporting groundbreaking biomedical research in the United States. This policy jeopardizes America’s global leadership in science and medicine. Urgent…

dlvr.it

I'm very happy to share our latest work with Seth Berger and the UCI-GREGoR team. Using long-read sequencing, we can detect de novo variants *without* sequencing both parents. We call our method duoNovo. preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... R package: github.com/sbergercnmc/... (1/n)

We have 8 days and we need to raise at LEAST $60,000 for a successful #StandUpforScience2025 These funds will go to: the DC rally, covering costs of local rally sites (e.g., insurance!), and setting up @standupforscience.bsky.social for March 8th and beyond! Our work only begins on March 7th!

Stand Up for Science!@standupforscience.net · last yr.

📣 Want to DONATE to help us Stand Up for Science on March 7th? *NEW LINK!* Make a tax-deductible donation using the QR code below! Direct link: www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/... #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence #standupforscience2025