@laurakwhite.bsky.social
Colorado RNA biologist & tRNA enthusiast exploring the wild frontiers of nanopore direct RNA sequencing at the intrepid venn diagram of northern blots & machine learning.
Ever notice that when one gene is disrupted, its orthologs get upregulated? This phenomenon, known as transcriptional adaptation, has been controversial and mysterious - glad to see that we are starting to learn how it works.
13.02.2026 21:42 — 👍 45 🔁 12 💬 2 📌 1I have been using Claude Code recently, and I’m now convinced that LLM coding agents can solve one of the biggest problems in neuroscience: technical debt.
Labs generate tons of low-quality code bc the incentive structure rewards short-term productivity over longer-term concerns like 1/
How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller?
Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase.
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Happy birthday to Charles Darwin,
patron saint of tired scientists, grumpy fieldworkers, and hating your own manuscript.
17 squares packed into a larger square. It looks dumb. But it's not.
I remade an old render with a more exact version. The most efficient packing possible of 17 squares into a larger square. I use it as an inspiring example: just because something looks stupid doesn't mean it's not the best that you can do.
06.02.2026 04:28 — 👍 26 🔁 8 💬 2 📌 0The ghosts in the machine of Christmas past, present, AND future
05.02.2026 01:05 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 01/4
Rep. Kelly Morrison, is a practicing M.D. Her description of conditions in the Whipple detention facility are horrifying.
Here is a rough transcript of the video she just posted. @kellymorrisonmn.bsky.social
Page 2 of last week's "The Week": This week's big news section covers "Anti-ICE protests across US," with subheaders: What is ICE? How have people responded ot ICE? What happened in Minneapolis? How did people react? and What will happen next?
Page two of this week's "The Week Jr." This week's big news section is titled Clashes escalate in Minneapolis, with subheaders Why is ICE in Minneapolis? What did federal agents do? What have government leaders said? How have people in the city reacted? and What will happen next.
The best thing I did for two different precocious 9/10 year olds in my life last year was sign them up for The Week, Jr., a kids news magazine that is just banging out unbiased reporting in between cool facts about the winter olympics and the world's longest living lemur as we live through history.
02.02.2026 02:20 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1[looking through a microscope, crying] i am begging you to do something sensible one time
[the infinite variety of forms most beautiful] lol no
We can also expect them to blame immigrants for it. www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-...
28.01.2026 15:03 — 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
📢 Rfam 15.1 is here!
✨ 50 new RNA families including riboswitch candidates, plastid ncRNAs, snoRNAs, plant xrRNAs and more.
🧬 10 families updated with 3D structures
🖥️ Brand new interactive alignment viewer
Take a look xfam.wordpress.com/2026/01/08/r...
#RNA #Bioinformatics #RNAbiology
Truly a classic. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-...
28.01.2026 03:41 — 👍 8 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Having fun with the microscope lately. Here’s one of my favourite artsy and slightly psychedelic shots of #Marchantia chloroplasts and a fluorescent membrane reporter. (z-stack maximum projection)
27.01.2026 15:50 — 👍 76 🔁 23 💬 3 📌 0
Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.
28.01.2026 01:51 — 👍 25415 🔁 6953 💬 7 📌 156
Alex Pretti from his early days working at the VA
Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now
24.01.2026 19:39 — 👍 23778 🔁 7859 💬 632 📌 612Me: "It would take an extremely fascinating new bird fact to distract me from the horrors"
New paper: hold my beer
Birds are very eye-dependent and eyes usually require a bunch of energy (and oxygen to metabolize it). Bird retinas run oxygen-free though, perhaps to fly extremely high (low O2)!
Picture shows a very sea-worn yellow Lego life raft on a white background. The life raft has been colonised by marine organisms, including tubeworms.
Another yellow Lego life raft has surfaced after nearly 29 years at the bottom of the sea. Back in 1997, 28,700 of these plummeted into the ocean when a shipping container with nearly five million pieces of Lego inside fell off the cargo ship Tokio Express, some 20 miles off Land's End.
21.01.2026 19:56 — 👍 145 🔁 28 💬 2 📌 1This is the way, and it's completely necessary for RNA data right now.
20.01.2026 22:09 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
This is both horrific and the one good use case for “sorry I don’t see race” in conversation.
14.01.2026 14:46 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0And of course I know that the brain is super energy intensive and that iron’s an essential cofactor for multiple enzymes in the electron transport chain but did I still think “eh, I’m not anemic, what possible impact could this have?” Yes, yes I did.
14.01.2026 14:36 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0A quick note to fellow winter blues people: this year my new primary care doc encouraged me to get ferritin to >50 ng/ml even though my levels were “normal range.” Took months but the energy difference is huge. Winter solstice +/- 3 weeks has always been hibernation time for me & now it’s… fine? ❄️🤷
14.01.2026 14:20 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0This is Minneapolis elementary school pick up:
The alert also recommends: "Bring your whistle & wear your hat. If you have a respirator or goggles bring them in a small backpack. We don't want to show up looking alarming for the kids but chemical weapons are being used widely in the area."
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Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version?
I made an app you might like: adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/
It all started a few years ago... 🧵
Lophophytum pyramidale. Photo credit: M. Virginia Sanchez Puerta
Happy to share this work with Virginia Sanchez-Puerta (not on bsky) and colleagues on how loss of photosynthesis in these (strange!) plants affects translation and tRNAs in plastids and mitochondria....
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Our job is to keep showing up and taking care of each other.
And knowing when to pause to refill so we can go back to doing it more.
Everything else is commentary.
I always like the stuff humans knocked out of the park on a first try like yep that’s a cup no need to go further
11.01.2026 14:35 — 👍 221 🔁 51 💬 1 📌 1
Save the date | Jan. 14 | Free webinar
Meeting with Congressional members or their staff is one of the most effective ways to advocate for science. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to plan and conduct a successful congressional meeting from start to finish.
When I explain to people what is involved with writing a successful grant, they simply don’t believe me.
I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!
A Western Union Telegraph agent plays a victrola that is set upon some box luggage. Two burros in front of the victrola, that are standing across train tracks, seem to listen intently.
This is maybe my favorite photo from Colorado history. From Granby, probably around 1905. I would get a tattoo of this.
15.11.2023 06:14 — 👍 93 🔁 21 💬 2 📌 2
