Bret Freudenthal's Avatar

Bret Freudenthal

@freudlab.bsky.social

Professor studying the interplay between DNA damage and human health. WY➡️CSU➡️UI➡️NIEHS➡️KU. Personal posts from science to society.

720 Followers  |  749 Following  |  60 Posts  |  Joined: 04.12.2023  |  1.8582

Latest posts by freudlab.bsky.social on Bluesky

I think people adjacent to science (but who now find themselves deciding the fate of US science somehow) undervalue humility, valuing braggadocios hubris instead.
Yes it’s true that some scientific discoveries are complete paradigm changers, and we celebrate these. 1/

16.10.2025 16:11 — 👍 148    🔁 46    💬 2    📌 3

By far. Juvenile.

17.10.2025 01:27 — 👍 15    🔁 5    💬 1    📌 1
satire: a spirit halloween costume that’s a “violent antifa terrorist” and includes:
- inflatable frog suit
- cape
- pepper spray filter
- a thirst for the blood of the innocent
- air pump

batteries and Molotov cocktails not included

satire: a spirit halloween costume that’s a “violent antifa terrorist” and includes: - inflatable frog suit - cape - pepper spray filter - a thirst for the blood of the innocent - air pump batteries and Molotov cocktails not included

whoever did this little bit of magnificence, take a bow

14.10.2025 17:48 — 👍 12071    🔁 2502    💬 133    📌 105
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Spread the word if you can.
We have an unused stopped flow accessory from Applied Photophysics. We traded in our Chirascan CD instrument so we have no use for this anymore. Reach out if you are interested and can find a home for this setup. Will ofcourse only work with a Chirascan!

08.10.2025 15:14 — 👍 7    🔁 10    💬 0    📌 0
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The Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe were beautiful today! Wonderful day for a hike.

11.10.2025 02:12 — 👍 5    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Congratulations to our #EMGS2025 Best Oral Presentation Award Winners!

Best Student Oral Presentation
1st Place (Tied): David Schuster and Abigayle Vito
2nd Place: Foster Jacobs

Best Early Career Investigator Oral Presentation
1st Place: Elijah Newcomb
2nd Place: Lindsay Volk

23.09.2025 14:01 — 👍 1    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0
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a white cat is sitting on a box with the words where written on it . ALT: a white cat is sitting on a box with the words where written on it .

The fiscal year is over.

So how was the NIH appropriation committed?

A long thread with institute by institute results about where the money went.

01.10.2025 16:07 — 👍 84    🔁 53    💬 2    📌 2
A graph showing the fraction of annual grant funding committed for NIH for fiscal years 2015 to 2025. The fiscal year 2025 lagged behind but then caught up over the last two months.

A graph showing the fraction of annual grant funding committed for NIH for fiscal years 2015 to 2025. The fiscal year 2025 lagged behind but then caught up over the last two months.

The fiscal year ends tomorrow.

Here are results from NIH Reporter downloaded an hour ago.

The total amount of funding committed for FY2025 at this point is 99.0% of that for FY2024. The same difference could be due to a variety of technical factors.

1/3

29.09.2025 17:37 — 👍 101    🔁 28    💬 2    📌 7

Thanks so much!!

26.09.2025 15:16 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Thanks to your incredible painting skills!

26.09.2025 15:16 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0
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How it started: Assistant to the Professor 👨‍🔬✨

How it’s going: Professor mode unlocked 👨‍🏫

Also clear evidence that science doesn’t just build knowledge… it ages ya too. 😉

🙏Grateful to all the mentors, colleagues, trainees, friends & family who made this journey possible. I am here because you all!

25.09.2025 23:25 — 👍 20    🔁 0    💬 2    📌 0

… or is it a basement of a Wyoming “resident” in Jackson

23.09.2025 15:50 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

I mean that seems to be the priorities, maybe we need a committee for these semi-pro “activities” to ensure proper training 🤣

23.09.2025 15:47 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
A graph showing the number of projects funded per year by NIH for fiscal years 2021-2025. Fiscal year 2025 shows a reduction in the number of projects of approximately 3000-4000.

A graph showing the number of projects funded per year by NIH for fiscal years 2021-2025. Fiscal year 2025 shows a reduction in the number of projects of approximately 3000-4000.

Here is a plot in terms of PROJECTS rather than dollars. I am using projects rather than awards so that projects that received supplements do not get double-counted.

While the FY25 curve is improving, it seems that the number of funded projects will drop by 3000-4000 compared with FY24.

22.09.2025 20:31 — 👍 37    🔁 22    💬 2    📌 4

i think regardless of who has authored a paper, we (the scientific community) can and should stop criticizing the work on lack of perceived novelty. we can do better than perpetuating harmful myths about individual scientific papers having to present a discovery no one has ever thought of before.

21.09.2025 19:10 — 👍 66    🔁 11    💬 2    📌 0

This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress!

We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below.

Read on for details... 1/x

13.09.2025 00:04 — 👍 261    🔁 81    💬 19    📌 12
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The eukaryotic replisome intrinsically generates asymmetric daughter chromatin fibers DNA replication is molecularly asymmetric, due to distinct mechanisms for lagging and leading strand DNA synthesis. Whether chromatin assembly on newly replicated strands is also asymmetric remains un...

Some (+)ve news to lighten another heavy weekend: our latest preprint (c/o Mattiroli + Ramani labs) is up!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A tour-de-force by 1st authors Bruna Eckhardt & @palindromephd.bsky.social, focusing on chromatin replication. RTs welcome; tweetorial in 3,2...(1/n)

20.09.2025 16:10 — 👍 74    🔁 40    💬 2    📌 2
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What an incredible @EMGSUS 2025 meeting last week! 🎉 Great science, community, and presentations. #EMGS2025

Special congrats to our lab members🏆 #proudPI:
Abbey Vito – 1st, Student Oral Presentation
Eli Newcomb – 1st, ECI Oral Presentation
Spencer Thompson – 2nd, Student Poster

22.09.2025 00:40 — 👍 5    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Are you a student, early career Investigator, or first time #EMGS meeting attendee?
Take part in the #EMGS2025 Quest to make sure you don’t miss anything and earn prizes along the way!
Start the Quest: form.jotform.com/251895711320...

06.09.2025 15:01 — 👍 0    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0
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APE1 active site residue Asn174 stabilizes the AP-site and is essential for catalysis Apurinic/Apyrimidinic (AP)-sites are common and highly mutagenic DNA lesions that can arise spontaneously or as intermediates during Base Excision Repair (BER). The enzyme apurinic/apyrimidinic endonu...

Thrilled to share our lab’s latest work in JBC! 🎉 We uncovered a critical role for APE1 Asn174 in stabilizing AP-sites using mutagenesis, enzymology, crystallography, and MD-simulations. Congrats to Kaitlin Dehart and all the co-authors! Check it out: www.jbc.org/article/S002...

05.09.2025 16:44 — 👍 10    🔁 4    💬 1    📌 0
DNA-repair-driven cell death compels us to rethink cancer therapies - Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology Emerging evidence suggests that, following genotoxic therapy, it is the repair of DNA double-strand breaks, rather than the damage itself, that frequently drives cancer cell death.

New from us in @natrevmcb.nature.com -- @szmyd-radoslaw.bsky.social & @radoncdocgee.bsky.social explore how DNA repair actively shapes cancer cell fate following DNA damage, reframing repair as both a protective process & a driver of treatment response and cell death. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

04.08.2025 05:48 — 👍 25    🔁 9    💬 1    📌 1

truly unreal. he's the guy who buys a lap dance and thinks the stripper and he had a deep connection

18.08.2025 21:56 — 👍 3910    🔁 768    💬 98    📌 23
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Great catching up with Matt during his visit with @barneslab.bsky.social!

15.08.2025 04:36 — 👍 5    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Congratulations Dr. Sowa! Such a great defense and project. Sara has a great lab and is doing wonderful work.

13.08.2025 12:42 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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The summer just flew by this year and today is the first day of 5th grade for these two. Go get em boys. 🥹

11.08.2025 12:45 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Spencer Thompson gave a great talk at the @kucancercenter.bsky.social Cancer Biology symposium this past week. He has really got this talk looking clean and sounding clear. #proudPI @lumicks.bsky.social

04.08.2025 14:25 — 👍 4    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0
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Great way to end two summer student internships with the KUcancercenter symposium. Fantastic work by Carson Gray (undergrad) and Esther Solange (high school student)!

Kudos to Abbey Vito, Peyton Oden, and Justin Ling for being wonderful mentors.

12.07.2025 20:06 — 👍 6    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

In the past 24 hours, Trump’s threatened Elon Musk, Thomas Massie, Japan, a judge in Israel, the CEO of AT&T, Jerome Powell, Canada, Thom Tillis, a Forbes reporter, Harvard, & migrants with being eaten by Burmese pythons in the Everglades, while releasing a new line of colognes.

01.07.2025 13:19 — 👍 8037    🔁 3070    💬 712    📌 412
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Congratulations Kaitlin Dehart on an outstanding PhD defense! I can’t believe another student has graduated from lab. #proudPI🥹

13.06.2025 22:31 — 👍 8    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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Who funds biomedical research? @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

10.03.2025 17:12 — 👍 618    🔁 309    💬 16    📌 25

@freudlab is following 20 prominent accounts