Javier Apfeld

These are so beautiful! 😍🪱

The Murphy Lab did our annual retreat this week. This year's theme was using AI (what it's good and bad for). I wanted to be open-minded to make sure we are not missing something we should be using it for, so we did a few exercises to test, and had presentations.

Defending PhD student, looking over their thesis: “If I knew then what I know now, I could’ve done all of this in like 9 months.”

A thread about my favorite pioneering cave explorers and why I don’t think AI will ever “solve” biology.

Congrats Ishmail!! ✨️🎉🍾

🚨My department is hiring a full-time Assistant Teaching Professor to teach undergrad Genetics & Genomics, upper-level Genomics, and an inquiry-based Computational Genomics course where students can do authentic research. 🧬💻

I’m on the search committee. DM me if you’re interested. Please share! 🙏

YouTube video by David Fay David's AlphaFold WorkShop 2026

Greetings! I decided to make a YouTube video of my AlphaFold workshop that I've given a few times in the past year. Caveats aside, people seem to find this useful for thinking about how to model protein interactions and how to interpret various AF outputs 1/2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u63o...

Congrats Katerina and the whole team!! 🎉✨️

All right it’s time for the annual “please tell us about one (or a few if you are ambitious) paper from 2025 that really impressed you and why we should all read it“! Go! If you tell us how it changed your view of the world and what makes it so powerful and consequential It would be excellent.

Flashbacks of ACeDB with accumulating C. elegans genome sequences and little/no tools; Paul Sternberg being frustrated and saying "we have to make this easier!" His solution was WormBase

This brings back memories of using Leon Avery's C. elegans WWW Server to get to the worm's parts list and to @vambros.bsky.social lab's comprehensive protocol collection 🪱✨️

What tools do we need to start engineering #aging and #longevity ? A🧵about something we've been cooking up in lab with Jeremy Vicencio at the @crg.eu : technology that lets us reach inside living animals and precisely dial multiple proteins' levels up and down. 1/10

Congrats Jeremy, Nick, and the whole team!! 🎉🪱✨️

Join us in welcoming GSA’s newest Board members: VP David Greenstein, Treasurer @marymullins.bsky.social, & Directors Monica Colaiacovo (@colaiacovolab.bsky.social), Tania Reis, & @jrossibarra.bsky.social. We’re grateful for their leadership & excited for what’s ahead. Learn more: buff.ly/7LZjkoP

This paper was written by my WormAtlas colleagues, Dave and Nate, in addition to 5 Nobel Prize winners. Hopefully more attention and funding will find its way to the invaluable C. elegans resources described in the paper.

I'm teaching a literature based class next semester and plan to share a method for reading a paper focused on note taking.

I think many graduate students don't take notes when reading research articles and consequently don't retain information well.

I'd love to hear what people think. 1/🧵

I love the idea of teaching note taking! I also ask my students to answer these questions as they read: What questions were the authors setting out to answer? How did they interpret their results? Do you agree with their interpretation? Did the authors succeed at answering their original questions?

Postdoctoral Researcher positions-Kapahi lab - Buck Institute - Career Page The Kapahi lab seeks postdocs to lead innovative projects exploring how circadian clocks & nutrient-responsive pathways influence eye & neuronal degeneration.

🚀 Postdoc opportunity!

The Kapahi Lab at Buck Institute for Research on Aging is hiring two postdoctoral researchers to lead cutting-edge studies on how nutrient signaling and circadian rhythms influence neurodegeneration & aging — combining fly, worm, and mammalian models with genomics. 📈

👉

From nematode to Nobel: How community-shared resources fueled the rise of Caenorhabditis elegans as a research organism | PNAS Experimental organisms such as the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are fundamental to biological discovery. The success of C. elegans research has ...

C. elegans researchers were early adopters of open science: "The development of common resources and the belief that research findings and mutant strains should be freely shared has propelled worm research to the forefront"
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I've always loved the openness and collegiality of our C. elegans community 🪱, but this perspective really helps emphasize just *how important* those traits are for scientific progress. A true tribute to how curiosity-driven science leads to innovation! 🙌

Read this inspiring perspectives coauthored by the Worm Resource directors and worm Nobel Laureates! 4 Nobel Prizes and how they were enabled by major NIH-supported research resources (the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, WormBase, and WormAtlas) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

a woman with a big hairdo is singing and the words simply the best are above her ALT: a woman with a big hairdo is singing and the words simply the best are above her

The C. elegans community is amazing. I email a Nobel laureate for a favor. He immediately responds yes and offers additional help!

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on.

(Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

Northern lights

Nice sky in Cambridge MA

My former undergad Hannah Tam gave a phenomenal PhD dissertation talk earlier today on the mechanisms of skin regeneration in mice!! So proud and such joy to see her shine so brightly! We had a mini lab reunion too, with Hannah and former undergad Juli Stanley.

Maybe the CGC has a good estimate based on how many labs ordered stains recently?

Voting sticker

I got my sticker!

A film you've seen more than seven times with a gif

Lio the dog dressed for Halloween

Lio the jack-o'-lantern dog 🎃🐶

Ep 141: Vulnerability in science and in genomes (with Katie Letterhos) — Big Biology Podcast What impact has the Trump administration had on biology and the scientific community? How do scientists study genomic adaptation and vulnerability? On this episode we talk with Katie Lotterhos , ...

I just listened to an excellent @bigbiology.bsky.social podcast interviewing my amazing colleague Katie Lotterhos @drk-lo.bsky.social, who’s been using surveys to give scientists a platform to tell their stories about how recent federal policy changes are affecting them and the practice of science.

Molecular & Cellular Physiology (MCP) Monday

We are recruiting a tenure-track assistant professor to join the Dept of Molecular & Cellular Physiology at Stanford. Apply to be our colleague 1/n
facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...