Vijay Ramani's Avatar

Vijay Ramani

@vram142

PI @ Gladstone Institutes & UCSF. Molecular technologies & the genomics / molecular biology / biochemistry of gene regulation. Views here mine & do not represent those of my affiliated institutions.

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23.08.2023
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Latest posts by Vijay Ramani @vram142

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

05.03.2026 15:58 👍 608 🔁 140 💬 8 📌 2

Have you ever wanted to do single-molecule biophysics in high-throughput? @matt-dejong.bsky.social (amazing joint grad student with @dunnlab.bsky.social) invented a way & measured >100,000 single molecules across 241 different sequences. (1/3)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

02.03.2026 20:12 👍 21 🔁 5 💬 2 📌 0
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Happy to share our Current Opinion review on the key challenges in accurately predicting 3D distances between chromatin segments and computing their dynamics. Thanks to @djost-physbiol.bsky.social @lucagiorgetti.bsky.social for the invitation to write this review! @shuvadipdutta.bsky.social

20.02.2026 11:25 👍 9 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 0

I argued in a piece I wrote in 2013 called ‘the frustrated gene’ that caps are an antiviral defense. Hence some viruses steal caps, other have their own capping enzymes, while others evolved IRESs. Here’s a virus that captured the entire cap recognition machinery. Conflicts begets comlexity.

18.02.2026 07:08 👍 21 🔁 7 💬 3 📌 0
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Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres - Nature Evolutionarily related ‘proto-point’ centromeres providing resolution to the evolutionary origins of point centromeres are identified in yeast, and comparison shows they evolved in an ancestor with re...

Our paper is now out in Nature:

“Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres”

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres.

1/14

18.02.2026 16:03 👍 227 🔁 115 💬 8 📌 10

🚨 Requesting help:

I am looking for an agent who can facilitate more speaking gigs, podcast appearances, and interviews with journalists

I want to more widely share my story and expertise as a trans geneticist who understands the reality and complexity of "biological sex" 🏳️‍⚧️🧬

Please signal boost?

28.01.2026 21:03 👍 314 🔁 257 💬 15 📌 19

No justice, no science. Fuck ICE.

26.01.2026 18:33 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0

If you are a scientist funded by NIH and agree that if the HHS/NIH bill is held hostage by linkage for funding to DHS/ICE, we need to shutdown both and save lives, its time to speak up. Right now, with a few exceptions, the silence is deafening

26.01.2026 13:46 👍 120 🔁 42 💬 7 📌 11
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Common variation in meiosis genes shapes human recombination and aneuploidy - Nature Analysis of data from pre-implantation genetic testing sheds light on the genetic basis of meiotic-origin aneuploidy, the leading cause of human pregnancy loss, identifying common genetic variants ass...

Pregnancy loss is common in humans, and chromosomal abnormalities are the leading cause. Using genetic data from ~140,000 IVF embryos, we show that maternal variation in meiosis genes influences recombination and aneuploidy risk.

First authors: @saracarioscia.bsky.social & @aabiddanda.github.io

21.01.2026 21:14 👍 121 🔁 55 💬 1 📌 5

positive / negative feedback always a possibility though. To extend your analogy --> sound engineers in audience move around the crowd and update speaker output across the space depending on crowd (louder in some cases!). Point still stands but the details genome-wide are probably important too.

15.01.2026 19:42 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
A picture of current members of the Groth lab

A picture of current members of the Groth lab

Congratulations to @groth-anja.bsky.social on receiving the Novo Nordisk Foundation Jacobæus Prize 🏆 we’re proud to see Anja's mentorship, leadership, & pioneering work in epigenetic cell memory getting top recognition 👏 celebrating the contributions of past & present lab members to this work too 🥳

14.01.2026 20:42 👍 68 🔁 11 💬 1 📌 0

Oof.

10.01.2026 04:19 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Read in Nature: nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09899-8

Read in Nature: nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09899-8

Stress controls epigenetic inheritance!

A histone ubiquitylation-based regulatory hub links stress/environmental signaling to heterochromatin self-propagation and epigenetic inheritance-reshaping how we think about development, drug resistance, and cancer
👉 nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09899-8

07.01.2026 16:46 👍 35 🔁 22 💬 3 📌 4
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Ninhydrin as a covalent warhead for chemical proteomic-enabled discovery and selective engagement of reactive arginines Covalent molecules have emerged as next-generation therapeutics and as powerful tools for perturbing fundamental biological processes. Chemical proteomic methods to screen for reactive proteinaceous a...

Is arginine the new cysteine?! Check out our lab's latest in collaboration with @ianseiple.bsky.social's team where we introduce ninhydrin as a selective covalent warhead and probe targeting reactive arginines.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

06.01.2026 15:39 👍 46 🔁 21 💬 3 📌 2

Oo send on over the list @reitergroup.bsky.social plz!!!

02.01.2026 19:32 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

Intrigued by a long-standing conundrum in small RNA biology—how nuclear Argonaute proteins silence transposons when they *need* target transcription for their own recruitment—we studied the piRNA pathway.

And found a hidden RNA-decay axis from Piwi to the RNA exosome.

22.12.2025 18:14 👍 98 🔁 42 💬 3 📌 5
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Ladies and gentlemen... the weekend. (also: you are important and are not alone 🧡)

20.12.2025 00:00 👍 1249 🔁 404 💬 6 📌 15

Daniele's lab's work demonstrates clearly the link between loop extrusion and regulated gene expression; context & cell-type matter. Statements like "more about X, less about Y" are only useful if context is specified. Homology search isn't relevant in a post-mitotic cell type.

18.12.2025 17:02 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Known for decades: DNA sequence drives nucleosome "rotational positioning" (which face of DNA contacts histones)

But: How does this persist when remodelers & transcription constantly mobilize nucleosomes? Our new preprint 1/ :

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

16.12.2025 19:50 👍 17 🔁 9 💬 1 📌 0
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Escape from X inactivation is directly modulated by Xist noncoding RNA Nature Cell Biology - The authors show that increased Xist RNA levels can induce de novo silencing of genes that normally escape X inactivation. SPEN depletion prevents the silencing of escape...

Very happy to share our paper rdcu.be/eUImj out today in @natcellbio.nature.com 🎉🎉🎉
We uncover an unexpected role for endogenous Xist RNA in regulating X-linked genes that escape X-inactivation.

15.12.2025 16:22 👍 71 🔁 31 💬 6 📌 2
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Menin-MLL1 complex cooperates with NF-Y to promote hepatocellular carcinoma survival Chromatin regulators are frequently mutated or aberrantly expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), suggesting that the dysregulation of chromatin …

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

15.12.2025 14:56 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Cohesin guides homology search during DNA repair using loops and sister chromatid linkages Accurate repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) is essential for genome stability, and defective repair underlies diseases such as cancer. Homologous recombination uses an intact homologous sequenc...

@science.org🧬Cohesin guides homology search during DNA repair using loops and sister chromatid linkages | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @fedeteloni.bsky.social @danielgerlich.bsky.social et al.

05.12.2025 20:50 👍 32 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0
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Oh hey, looks like I can upload longer videos here now!
Here’s my most recent one covering the latest findings on ecDNA retention mechanisms from the Chang & Mischel labs.

04.12.2025 01:20 👍 15 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

Oxidative phosphorylation complexes contain subunits encoded by both the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. How do cells coordinate the synthesis and assembly of these complexes at the inner membrane? We teamed up with Martin Ott (@mitolab.bsky.social) to address this in two recent papers.

03.12.2025 20:42 👍 80 🔁 31 💬 1 📌 2
Overview of Integrated Robotic Imaging and Sequencing, IRIS

Overview of Integrated Robotic Imaging and Sequencing, IRIS

We just released IRIS (7+yrs project), a tech we believe will transform cell biology by pairing high-resolution cell images with matched #scRNAseq, letting us interpret cellular form by its molecular ground truth.
Huge tx to @JohannesBues, @JoernPezoldt, @CamilleLambert et al.
shorturl.at/zgY8Z

02.12.2025 14:17 👍 52 🔁 15 💬 2 📌 2

Here is a copy of last year's Twitter thread explaining our preprint - jump to (21) for the new stuff 👀

Synergy between cis-regulatory elements can render cohesin dispensable for distal enhancer function

now revised and journal accepted at www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🧵👇

27.11.2025 21:58 👍 89 🔁 45 💬 4 📌 3

Man it would be so cool if, in the year 2025 of our lord, we could all just be chill and celebratory about nice professional things being announced for our colleagues in molecular biology.

Unrelated, anyone reading absolute Batman? Bc it slaps.

29.11.2025 10:30 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW - Toronto (City), Ontario (CA) job with Taipale Lab, Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto | 12849004 The Taipale lab in the Donnelly CCBR and University of Toronto is looking for a highly motivated Postdoctoral Fellow

We are looking for a postdoctoral fellow to work on induced proximity 🤜🤛 and functional genomics! Join our team in Toronto 🇨🇦 to tackle major challenges in oncology and neurodegeneration. www.nature.com/naturecareer...

19.11.2025 17:51 👍 31 🔁 44 💬 0 📌 1
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RNA polymerase II coordinates histone deacetylation at active promoters Transcription initiation limits histone acetylation and H2AZ incorporation at promoters.

Unpause! I'm super happy to now be able to share the published version of our paper at Science Advances showing that:
1) active histone mods occur independently of transcription
2) transcription coordinates histone deacetylation at active promoters
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

12.02.2025 21:21 👍 116 🔁 41 💬 5 📌 2

😧😂

21.11.2025 21:55 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0