Alejandro Montenegro

Great Zoom meeting today with @bloodgenes.bsky.social.

We have some things cooking!

Yes, maybe, but it would not be about whether they have agreed or not to review before. Or it shouldn't 😅

Agreeing to review for a journal does not improve your chances of getting your own paper accepted there.

Further, recommending acceptance does not reduce your chances, as if a 'slot had been taken', and recommending rejection does not increase them, as if a 'slot had opened up'

This is all fine and good.

But please, sign your editorials.

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

#ThankYourEditor♥️

Native chromatome profiling reveals hundreds of metabolic enzymes in the nucleus across tissues - Nature Communications Here proteomic chromatome analysis shows metabolic enzymes widely localize to chromatin in cancer in a tissue-specific manner. Nuclear enzymes affect DNA damage/repair and transcription, revealing non...

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.

We do it because we care 😊

"Non-scientists with pet theories should ideally be directed away from arXiv"

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

bioRxiv: "Hypotheses without new data...are considered out of scope and will not be posted"

www.biorxiv.org/about/FAQ 1/n

👀

Congrats, this is great. Maybe you can join us next year at @molbiosystems.bsky.social to tell us more about your work 😊

Seven wonders of RNA modification biology This Perspective discusses seven frontiers in RNA modification research. The examples cited highlight technological advances, regulatory principles both unique and broad-spanning, and questions about how biological information is ...

This piece discusses seven frontiers in RNA modification research. The examples cited highlight technological advances, regulatory principles both unique & broad-spanning, & questions about how biological information is post-transcriptionally encoded in chemical marks comprising just a few atoms.

High-frequency biparental inheritance of plant mitochondria upon chilling stress and loss of a genome-degrading nuclease - Nature Plants Maternal inheritance of mitochondria breaks down in the cold when a mitochondrial DNA degrading nuclease is defective, resulting in biparental inheritance that can rescue mitochondrial mutations and g...

"Here, we have established a robust genetic screen to detect paternal mitochondrial inheritance in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum)"

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

👀

Guest Post — The Value Challenge in Scholarly Publishing - The Scholarly Kitchen Today's guest blogger identifies signals of how fractured the scholarly research ecosystem has become, and how the value publishers provide is increasingly questioned, dismissed, or overlooked by key ...

"Equally important is sustained & inclusive dialogue among all stakeholders in the research ecosystem, including publishers, researchers, funders, institutions, & scholarly societies. The challenges facing scholarly publishing are systemic & cannot be addressed through isolated or unilateral action"

Yup. If people don't read what they cite (and many don't), or only access papers via LLMs (which many do, and that number will continue to grow), they may not be aware (or care) that a paper has been retracted, and will continue to cite it as if nothing has happened.

Which is terrible.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

And there's also this

bsky.app/profile/mkru...

A symbiotic origin of the ribosome? Abstract. The origin of life is one of the great mysteries of science. Of the multiple unsolved problems, the origin of the translation system (the means b

Interesting, and this also just came out

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Fungal genome sequencing for free! 👇🏼 #GGFungi2026

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Fred Hutch is dedicated to the elimination of cancer and related diseases as causes of human suffering and death.

My awesome colleague, @yarimura.bsky.social, is recruiting a postdoc to start at the end of 2026 or early 2027! His lab uses cryo-EM to uncover structural basis of key chromatin events using native complexes isolated from human cells or Xenopus egg extracts!

careers-fhcrc.icims.com/jobs/30706/p...

It seems like nowadays, with AI, I'm increasingly waking up to read about people coming up with solutions for problems that do not exist.

A symbiotic origin of the ribosome? Abstract. The origin of life is one of the great mysteries of science. Of the multiple unsolved problems, the origin of the translation system (the means b

"we propose that the protoribosome was a parasite (...). If this view is correct, then like the spliceosome in the stem eukaryote, a repurposed host-parasite interaction led to a dramatic change in cell biology at the base of the tree of life, in this case leading to the exit from an RNA world"

📷Cover image info: cshprotocols.cshlp.org/content/2026...

📒Full issue: cshprotocols.cshlp.org/content/2026...

A new issue of CSH Protocols is out!
@cshlpress.bsky.social

The cover image highlights the work by Moss et al., who describe how to use fluorescence flow cytometry and specific AuxInYeast strains to study #maize auxin perception.

⬇️Links below

"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...

Ah, good for you!

bsky.app/profile/aemo...

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

The quoted preprint at the start of the thread is now out

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Yup, a key aspect of my proposal is trust, which directs also which journals can be part of the suite

Hahahhaha

Please read the proposal 😊