Pls re-post: My department @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social are recruiting for several new faculty positions (links below). Broad search in molecular biology/biochemistry, across prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Interested in understanding life at the molecular level, this job might be for you!
1/n
I am - thanks, I'll add it to the list
Today's grant reviewing soundtrack is brought to you by Outer Wilds. I'm on a videogame soundtrack kick
Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302
The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.
What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.
Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.
New paper out in Nature Communications:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We found >250 metabolic enzymes on chromatin.
Only ~20 had been reported before.
This means hundreds of metabolic enzymes may have unexplored nuclear roles.
disco elysium soundtrack is excellent grant reviewing music
I haven't moved over to positron, and rstudio can be run interactively on the cluster easily, although not with the assistant. Another subscription is kind of annoying though
Self-clustering of three CBX2 molecules drives PRC2 to promote facultative heterochromatinization of Polycomb target genes
www.cell.com/molecular-ce...
That is 667 scientific labs funded for 5 years each.
Every day.
Funded by NIH + NSF. No private investor funds a 16-week mouse study on OL gene biology.
Federal science builds the foundation industry stands on. Neurological disease costs the U.S. $800B/year. This is what the return on that investment looks like.
#NIH #NSF #TaxpayerInvestment #Neurotech
Claude code remote control is wild. Running a random quick idea I had on my desktop while approving agent tasks from my phone
1/ 🧵 In our new paper, we show that JARID2 and PALI1 mimic H3K27me3 to antagonise PRC2. www.cell.com/molecular-ce...
Over the weekend, I started collecting/organizing a list of cool #rstats skills for LLMs at github.com/christopherk.... Please open an issue or PR in any awesome additions you see!
Includes a section for helpful posts like @ivelasq3.bsky.social's⬇️
Great to see this work out, led by Jon Rosen and co-supervised Karen Mohlke @klmohlke.bsky.social!
Connecting to some recent threads here:
Also, $550 billion is a decade of science spending in America (NIH and NSF).
Just completely unconscionable.
Evolution navigated billions of challenges to get to us to where we are today. Directed evolution compresses this to a 1D axis.
Imagine if you could sample 200 dimensions at once, with data to boot 📈
First @chorylab.bsky.social PACE preprint on our new system to tackle this: bit.ly/turboprance
I rounded up a few Claude Skills for #RStats users.
Huge thanks to the creators who developed them. They share Skills for everything from tidyverse code to brand.yml files to learning while using AI.
Hope the list is useful, and please let me know what I missed! 🧡
rworks.dev/posts/claude...
Our preprint is published in MSB! This time with the correct preprint post below! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
I think there is a need for a complete re-think for organoid modeling.
As long as the architecture of organoids that you produce is not directly compared to a 3D map of the organ (say, a fallopian tube) or disease to be modeled, it will be approximate.
More here: www.science.org/doi/full/10....
"Here, we present SPAtial Cell Exploration (SPACE), a spatial CRISPR screening platform that integrates whole-transcriptome profiling (~18,000 genes), multiplexed protein detection (~68 markers), and CRISPR perturbation mapping at subcellular resolution"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The nuclear oncoprotein SET is necessary for MLL/KMT2A binding and transcriptional elongation. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.26.708410v1
THERE IS ONLY ONE TRUE WAY TO CODE AND IT IS TIDY. All others will perish on the altar of messiness. MUAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Incredibly proud to share our new preprint, lead by the Incomparable Rithika Sankar.
Here we temporally dissect the role of FACT in mES cells, finding that FACT loss drives progressive deterioration of chromatin architecture, leading to transcriptional collapse.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Indeed. New grants are not getting funded, already funded grants are not getting paid, and non-competitive renewals are being held up.
Focusing on the top line budget, instead of looking at what is really happening on “the ground” is deeply misguided.
New version of our preprint on bioRxiv about bioRxiv up. Now that’s what I call a revision – 6 years after the first version!
It has new data about our progress and highlights from a massive user survey. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
I have written a piece articulating what I believe is a reasonably new position on AI, or at least one extremely underrepresented in the discourse, and I hope people will read it. The full piece is behind the New Scientist paywall, but I will share some snippets www.newscientist.com/article/2516...
The beta of integrating this into rstudio is pretty handy for a lot of stuff I'd have to dig in documentation for
Happy to share scHiCAR, an ultra-high throughout (millions of cells), low cost (5 cents/cell including NGS), and trimodal platform for integrated single-cell level analysis of mRNA, open chromatin, and 5-kb resolution looping with ground-truth data the same individual cell.
I love this -- a really fantastic start at turning LLM-assisted coding from something folks fear will sap their skills into a great opportunity for clear-headed learning and continuing education. And instead of making those separate activities, why not both at once? Try it out!
You guys know your voicemail pin?
