@harmitmalik
Study genetic conflicts professionally. Try to avoid conflicts in personal life (with mixed results). Fred Hutch Basic Sciences, UW Genome Sciences, HHMI. Posting in a personal capacity. My posts don’t reflect my employers’ opinions.
Page of forever stamps with a picture of Alex Trebek and a jeopardy style Answer reading “this naturalized US citizen hosted the quiz show Jeopardy! For 37 seasons”
Spouse who is an immigration lawyer just got the world’s greatest USPS forever stamps for his mail
Are you attending the #Dros26 Fly Meeting in Chicago?
Please join me at the #SUFS rally on Sat, Mar 7, 1pm, at the Federal Plaza, 230 S. Dearborn Street.
The rally site is ≈1.25 miles away from the conference hotel & is easily accessible by CTA buses.
#Drosophila
www.standupforscience.net/march7
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.
“A country that can instantly fund endless wars but debates every dime for healthcare and education doesn't have a budget issue--it has a values issue."
A billion dollars a day going towards the war in Iran so far.
This is a chilling crime. A shame on our country. The Iranian ship was unarmed. The US knew this. The sailors were murdered by our navy, and the survivors were left to die at sea.
newrepublic.com/post/207429/...
This is not good.
Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration. He may also be among the most cold-hearted, extreme and cruel. www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1Lu...
🤣🤣🤣
Every time grief undoes my life, I think about these words I wrote when I was 15 and my horse died.
Cartoon by
David Horsey
💯💯💯
Self-amplifying RNA improves heart function after myocardial infarction in mice and pigs @science.org @columbiauniversity.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Major plot twist in the Firefly TV series and Serenity movie
Portraits of some of the researchers that The Regime has run off.
We are losing so many excellent researchers.
If you're at the airport and Kristi Noem is doing the ominous little message from the TSA screens, you no longer have to do anything she says. Leave your laptop in the case, whatever.
Yes, much less but not zero paternal mt gets into egg but mature sperm already have <1 mtDNA on average
There are a bunch of mechanisms:
* Nuclease degradation of mtDNA
* Exclusion of TFAM from sperm mitochondria (prevents mtDNA replication if any gets through)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37723262/
* Ubiquitination of mitochondria and mitophagy
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27852436/
Yes, I think Daria Siekhaus made that same comment yesterday.
Folks interested to know more about this work, check out Lautaro's insights at @the-node.bsky.social
And he's soon starting his lab at @iubiology.bsky.social - so please reach out to him if you're interested!
#Dros26 #Drosophila #development
@justinmcrocker.bsky.social: Sublethal doses cause significant behavioral shifts, tracking avoidance and behavior and phosphoproteomics to identify causal signaling pathways
Justin Crocker (EMBL) presents a plenary talk (final for this morning) on an ai-powered behavior screen for larval lethality and avoidance using a pesticide library (from Signa catalog at three different concentrations); very high dimensional data; both short term acute & long term lethality #Dros26
Not in talk: Interesting question is what happens if sperm do not eliminate mtDNA? I think another mechanism, identified by Steve DeLuca might also eliminate paternal mtDNA? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22421049/
The endonuclease is named Hotaru (from Google: Hotaru (ほたる, 蛍) is the Japanese word for firefly. It symbolizes ephemeral beauty, the transient nature of life) which appears to target structured DNA elements in Drosophila mtDNA.
Rebecca is starting her lab as a UCSF Sandler fellow in August 2026; folks at #Dros26 interested in host-parasitoid interactions should try to catch her at the meeting to find out about available positions: www.tarnopollab.org/people
Another very clever approach: use split-GFP approach to screen which is endonuclease encoded by nucleus targets to the mitochondria matrix and could be the endonuclease that leads to sperm mtDNA elimination. Unpublished and very interesting so will stop describing here #Dros26
Thomas Hurd (Univ Toronto) @tomhurd on how paternal mtDNA gets “cut out of inheritance”; 100s of mtDNA in oocyte but <1 per sperm; this elimination takes place within spermatogenesis from immature to mature sperm; mtDNA eliminated but not mitochondria themselves (sperm need energy to swim) #Dros26
In addition to listening to amazing Drosophila plenaries I’m also watching England pull off an almost incredible chase in the T20 World Cup semifinal against India so getting a bit distracted 😅
Volker Hartenstein (UCLA) presenting his plenary talk on the analysis of neural circuits based on connectomes of the Drosophila brain (one of the most exciting recent developments in all of fly biology I think) reveal lineages, compartment boundaries, development (embryo-> larval-> adult) #Dros26
