Alex Cagan

Thanks Matt!

Curious Cases - Series 24 - Immortal Jellies - BBC Sounds Hannah Fry and Dara Ó Briain ask whether a tiny jellyfish holds the secret to immortality.

Thrilled to announce that I'm on Curious Cases tomorrow at 10am on BBC Radio 4!

The episode - Immortal Jellies - looks at some remarkably long-lived species and what they can teach us about ageing. This is a key area of focus for our lab.
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Julie Ahringer from @gurdoninstitute.bsky.social @geneticscam.bsky.social @cam.ac.uk gives talk on decoding genome regulation during development. Exploring how chromatin accessibility changes throughout development enable single cells to become multicellular organisms.

This is a fantastic opportunity to do exciting research on comparative somatic evolutionary genomics as part of a great team. I've collaborated with Peter for many years and highly recommend this position! Please email Peter if you'd like to learn more, including a copy of your CV.

Love seeing methodical comparisons of preservation protocols like this! Great to know for the future

night science

Thanks @trevorgraham.bsky.social it was an honour to participate in this great workshop with such an engaged and diverse cohort in a rapidly growing community

Closing keynote from the fabulous @atjcagan.bsky.social on "The impossibility of whales" discussing somatic mutagenesis across species. Brilliantly delivered and exceptionally illustrated talk, as anyone who knows Alex's work would expect! #EBECancer25
@eventswcs.bsky.social

Thanks @amyboddy.bsky.social for the invitation to run this workshop on where ideas come from in science, barriers to creativity and how to overcome them. Great discussion from the group! I'm a convert to 'night science' @urialonlab.bsky.social

The Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues Network @nature.com @timcoorens.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A signature-agnostic test for differences between tumor mutation spectra reveals carcinogen and ancestry effects Mutational signatures contain valuable information about the mutational processes shaping cancer genomes. However, despite dozens of tools to identify signatures in cancer samples, there is not an est...

If you’ve ever wondered about the statistical significance of differences among mutational signature profiles, check out our new Aggregate Mutation Spectrum Distance (AMSD) preprint co-led by Sam Hart and @alisonfeder.bsky.social with @nalcala.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Advancing cancer research via comparative oncology - Nature Reviews Cancer Comparative oncology combines evolutionary biology, ecology, veterinary medicine and clinical oncology to better understand cancer, for example, by identifying the molecular and cellular mechanisms un...

A new review paper for those interested in how comparative approaches are informing cancer research. Advances in genomic resources for non-traditional model organisms (whales, bats, and beyond!) is set to transform our ability to gain insights from cancer resistant species.

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

How and when organisms edit their own genomes - Nature Genetics This Review describes the changes that some organisms make to their own DNA sequences, linking many to common genetic mechanisms built around canonical DNA repair and to a set of functional circumstan...

New Review Paper! I usually study mutations caused by failures to repair DNA damage, but organisms also deliberately edit their own genomes. This review by Vincent, @sebastianevda.bsky.social and myself takes a look at 'How and when organisms edit their own genomes'

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

Another great Sanger Sketcher to follow for summaries of research talks @isabellease.bsky.social

Elegant new theory on polygenic adaptation by Will Milligan, Laura Heyward, and Guy Sella.

Thanks to everybody who chimed in!

I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist.

So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

Had a lot of fun designing this special double issue cover on long reads with @genomeresearch.bsky.social

Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics.

“A rising wave of white nationalism in many parts of the globe could threaten the progress that has been made in science — and broader society — towards a more equitable world

As scientists and members of the public, we must push back against this threat”
🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Microbial metabolite drives ageing-related clonal haematopoiesis via ALPK1 - Nature ADP-heptose binds to ALPK1, triggering transcriptional reprogramming and NF-κB activation, endowing pre-leukaemic cells with a competitive advantage due to excessive clonal proliferation.

B͓̊å͓c͓̊t͓̊e͓̊r͓̊i͓̊å͓l͓̊ s͓̊ů͓g͓̊å͓r͓̊ f͓̊ů͓e͓̊l͓̊s͓̊
c͓̊å͓n͓̊c͓̊e͓̊r͓̊ r͓̊i͓̊s͓̊k͓̊

Study in 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 finds ADP-HEPTOSE, a bacterial sugar produced by Gram- gut flora, leaks into the bloodstream with age, activating NF-κB, giving pre-leukaemic blood cells a growth edge, and triggering dangerous clonal haematopoiesis

Starczynowski Lab U Cincinnati

The honor was all mine! Great to see you again Dmitri

Happy to have contributed to this great collection of articles!

I had a great time working with @genomeresearch.bsky.social on these two covers that combine to form a single image for part 1 and 2 of their long-read sequencing special issues

The MIMIC lab is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join my team at @Cambridge_Uni!
Exploration and engineering DNA-mimicking proteins (wet-lab position.) 🧬
Details: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50652/
Please get in touch / circulate !

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Interested in a starting PI position at University College London to work on Genetics, Evolution or the Environment? My department has opened the call for expressions of interest for sponsorship of independent fellowship applications.

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Fascinating and thought provoking thread thanks for sharing!

A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans - Nature Genetics The cobraa model extends the pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent to identify structured population history by examination of the model transition matrix. Applied to human polymorphism data, cob...

Our paper on ancient human population structure is now published. We find that the ancestors of modern humans lived in multiple populations during the period when Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An excellent postdoc opportunity with Adrian Baez-Ortega at the University of Cambridge on the genomics of transmissible cancer.

Adrian is a brilliant scientist and mentor, this is a fantastic opportunity I strongly recommend.

loved the talk - great overview of the benefits of using complete genomes

Talk by
@khmiga.bsky.social for the @sinaigenhealth.bsky.social Institute for Genomic Health Seminar Series on the potential of complete genomes and pangenomes for improving human health