Jeff Henderson

Worth reading and considering carefully for those of us in academia. Well stated @holdenthorp.bsky.social!

Trump approval sinks as Americans criticize his major policies, poll finds President Donald Trump’s 100 days poll finds a lower approval rating, growing opposition to his agenda and opposition to many of his major initiatives.

"Do you support reducing federal funding for medical research?"

21% support, 77% OPPOSE

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

I am grateful and excited to begin this new work!

It is tough to evaluate and fund risky, interdisciplinary work but the visionaries at the Hypothesis Fund were willing to help! Many thanks to brilliant #HFScouts Dianne Newman for very thoughtful engagement.

Great idea. Can you add me?

Development of a metabolome-based respiratory infection prognostic during COVID-19 arrival | mBio In a new respiratory virus pandemic, the ability to identify patients at greatest risk for severe disease is essential to direct scarce medical resources to those most likely to benefit from them. Tools to predict disease severity are best developed early ...

Who is in danger?

NEW FROM THE LAB: For respiratory virus infections, antivirals must generally be administered before progression to severe illness to be effective. As COVID arrived, we sought a metabolomic signature in patients to predict this. We found one!
journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

"Science is a messy human process that converges on the truth...If everyone doing science has the same background, those biases are amplified.  But if groups of scientists bring different backgrounds to their work, they’ll have different biases and will converge on the truth faster."

Fine points. We (academic biologists) probably don’t spend enough time directly addressing and acknowledging these kinds of choices. With the inherent complexity of biology, such choices are unavoidable. Variety in how different people navigate this is invaluable and makes a field vibrant.

Talented student Jim Heffernan followed the data on an unexpected result in lab to this surprising resolution: a siderophore system associated with increased pathogenic potential in Enterobacterales is also a (previously unappreciated) quorum sensing system!

New from the lab: E.coli don’t just release the siderophore Enterobactin (Ent), they release Ent fragments. Why? After recovering iron from iron-Ent after minimal hydrolysis, E.coli send the pieces back out for bonus rounds of iron-scavenging. Reduce, re-use, recycle! www.jbc.org/article/S002...