Nanopore-based sequencing of active DNA replication reveals key principles of metazoan replication fork progression, origin and termination sites https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.26.678856v1
PIWI clade Argonautes are essential for transposon silencing. Without them, animals are sterile due to massive transposon activity.
But how does piRNA-guided target interaction translate into silencing?
PhD student Júlia Portell Montserrat has an intriguing answer
www.cell.com/molecular-ce...
How cells lock down “jumping genes”:
Researchers from IMBA and IMP identify the first protein interactions that trigger PIWI–piRNA–mediated transposon silencing, using AlphaFold predictions, genetics, biochemistry and cell biology.
Read more: www.viennabiocenter.org/about/news/t...
Excited to share my postdoc work, out on bioRxiv today! Histones package DNA into nucleosomes to form the building blocks of chromatin, but how modular and programmable is this system? 1/9
Are you someone who has been or could be affected by imminent ICE raids in Chicago?
Do you have friends, family members or neighbors who have been or could be?
If you have information you can share, please reach out to @melissa-sanchez.bsky.social on Signal or WhatsApp at 872-444-0011.
Tissue 'tectonic' collision is detrimental, but flies found two distinct solutions! Gratifying and grateful to be included in this collective effort, w/ Steffen Lemke, to crack the (or 'a') code of #cephalicfurrow, now out in @nature.com, all with @paveltomancak.bsky.social at the helm. (1/9)
We are all super happy and proud to see our work on the function and evolution of the #cephalic #furrow published in @nature.com. Let me say a few things about the background and history of this work on the #Evolution_of_Morphogenesis (1/12)
Priyom's preprint is out on biorxiv. See below for a detailed thread. In a nutshell, she has discovered and characterized the oscillator that times notochord and spine segmentation in zebrafish. Turns out that there are uniform Erk oscillations across the entire tissue that act as timekeepers!
I have
NIGMS R35, impact score 12
NIHGRI R21, 4th percentile
NHGRI R01, 7th percentile (co-I)
and it seems like none will be funded. 0/3.
PO (who has been very helpful) said "Unfortunately, I do not expect this application will be selected for funding in FY25."
😭
Extremely excited to share that I’m joining Columbia University @columbiauniversity.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor!
We will explore how the mobile genome works—how transposons shape us, our DNA and how they can be harnessed to build useful technologies. #NewPI #RNAsky #TEsky
thawanilab.org
New paper on the role of H3K4me3 at enhancers! We (led by Haoming Yu) used dCas9 epigenome editing to add H3K4me3 to intergenic enhancers. This was (1) sufficient to turn up transcription at open, active regions and (2) has no effect on target gene transcription. genesdev.cshlp.org/content/earl...
NU Professor Jane Wu’s daughter and colleagues called her an “outstanding scientist” dedicated to “the greater good.” Before she died in July 2024, she was investigated, then cleared by the government. She still lost her funding and lab space.
—
Reported by William Tong
Congrats to UNC Biology professor En Yang, named one of this year's Pew Scholars. Yang uses zebrafish as an experimental model to study the neural pathways involved in learning and memory formation. 1/n
college.unc.edu/2025/08/en-y...
Big congrats to our postdoc @mary-flores.bsky.social, who's among the 2025 Pew Latin American Fellows! 🐟🧬🫀🧪
Onwards, always.
#PewLatinAmericanFellows #zebrafish #PILife #PostdocLife #devbio @cudevbio.bsky.social
Snails with human-like eyes?!
Published in @natcomms.nature.com, the @planaria1.bsky.social & @accorsi-alice.bsky.social Labs have established apple snails as a novel model for studying vision restoration. They have complex camera-type eyes & the ability to regrow them in 28 days: bit.ly/4mvaxkq
The Parker Lab at UNC Biology is hiring a postdoc to work on insect–microbe interactions.
Support available for multiple years from startup; we are open to a range of project ideas. Come join us to study symbiosis in a supportive, collaborative environment!
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/303...
"[Our] journals provide a rapid and informed assessment by expert scientific editors (on average, within 4 days)."
Friends, it will be 2 weeks tomorrow. 😢
Thanks to Ellie, Natalie, and @corinnecroslyn.bsky.social for driving these projects and to everyone who helped along the way.
Check out the full preprint here:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
10/10 (end)
It also means that there is a brief but perhaps significant time in development when the maternal and paternal genomes are very asymmetric in their methylation state.
Ellie's model predicts that the paternal genome "catches up" about an hour after ZGA.
This may have biological implications.
9/10
So what does this mean?
We think it’s a beautiful example of how histone modifications can be inherited in cis through read-write feedback, and indicates that the K27me2 state has sufficient information to do this.
8/10
To test that (because flies are the best) Ellie used mutants that produce haploid embryos (just maternal chromatin). If the model was right, all chromatin should now retain K27me2.
And that’s exactly what she found.
7/10
Sure enough, K27me2 survives! But there's a twist: only half the chromatin stains positive.
Her model suggested a reason: the surviving methylation might be from mom's genome, not dad's.
6/10
Her model predicted what we already knew: fast divisions erase H3K27me3. But it also made a new prediction: lower-order methylation states like H3K27me2 might persist through the rapid divisions.
So she tested it.
5/10
Ellie, a PhD student in the lab, built a model of this process. She started from a published computational framework, added our new measurements, and asked: what happens to histone methylation during these fast cycles?
4/10
In the first study, we found that these rapid early divisions not only erase H3K27me3 but also that key nucleators of this modification are kept out of the nucleus until just before the zygotic genome activates.
3/10
Early fly embryos undergo super fast cell cycles—which is not great for enzymes like E(z) that modify histones very sloooowly.
Still, prior work (Iovino, Cavalli labs) showed that Polycomb can transmit information across generations.
2/10
Excited to share a new preprint from the lab!
This (doi.org/10.1101/2025...) and an earlier one (doi.org/10.1101/2025...) mark my lab's first steps into studying how Polycomb modifications get established in early Drosophila development.
🧵 1/10
Happy to announce a new preprint from my lab looking in to the establishment of polycomb domains in early fly development and contributions from pioneer factors Zelda and GAGA-factor.
Excited to share the bulk of my postdocotoral work from the @ditalialab.bsky.social on how cells interpret dynamic morphogen signaling during development! Many thanks to our collaborators & coauthors @shelbyflies.bsky.social, Massimo Vergassola, Jacqueline Janssen, and Anna Chao.
Thanks @socdevbio.bsky.social for this great opportunity! Looking forward to reconnecting with everyone in beautiful San Juan, PR!
