Christian Gallardo

📣 New paper alert! Just out in Cell Reports! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40644298/
Thrilled to share that we have discovered a brand-new anti-phage defense system! Bacteria have evolved various defense strategies (CRISPR etc) to counter phage attacks. We found a new one - fascinating and dramatic
⚔️🦠❄️🔬

💥 Boom! All gene fragment formats starting at 2 day turnaround time, only 7¢ per base.

Press Release: investors.twistbioscience.com/news-release...

@twistbioscience.com

Inside the Bloodbath at the NIH Sources say that a climate of fear has spread throughout the agency as the Trump administration takes a hatchet to its core functions.

Who are the functionaries carrying out the destruction of the NIH? The Gang of Four: Memoli, McElroy, Schnabel, Bhattacharya. There are others, but these men play major day-to-day roles, they are the implementers, the enforcers, the true believers. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

The RMaP challenge of predicting RNA modifications by nanopore sequencing - Communications Chemistry RNA modifications play critical roles in gene expression regulation, RNA stability, and translation efficiency, however, the detection of RNA modifications by various sequencing approaches may present...

Check out our recently published paper about identifying RNA modifications from raw Nanopore data: www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Congrats to Jannes, Manja and all the co-authors!

Couldn’t wait to share - SQUARNA 2.0 is here, with greatly improved performance in single-sequence RNA secondary structure prediction!
github.com/febos/SQUARNA
Updated preprint is coming soon :)
#SQUARNA #RNA #2D #Structure #Prediction #Bioinformatics #Research #Pseudoknot

Important 🧵 if your research depends on genome assemblies from long (PacBio / ONT) reads. As @merenbey.bsky.social says, these may not be the genomes you are looking for. TLDR: the assemblers are wrong and predict too many small circular contigs.

🧬 Happy National DNA Day! 🧬
Today we celebrate the completion of the human genome project (2003) and discovery of the double helix (1953). From genome editing to RNA therapeutics, research into nucleic acids continues to drive scientific breakthroughs #NationalDNADay #NucleicAcids #DNAday2025

The Palantirs were originally made so that the Men of the West could communicate.

But then they were taken over by the Enemy to spread corruption, sow fear, and spread disinformation to destroy the world of Men.

Kudos to Peter Thiel for choosing the most accurate name for his company.

April 14, 2025 VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL Josh Gruenbaum Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service General Services Administration Sean R. Keveney Acting General Counsel U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Thomas E. Wheeler Acting General Counsel U.S. Department of Education Dear Messrs. Gruenbaum, Keveney, and Wheeler: We represent Harvard University. We are writing in response to your letter dated April 11, 2025, addressed to Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard’s President, and Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation. Harvard is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in its community. Antisemitism and discrimination of any kind not only are abhorrent and antithetical to Harvard’s values but also threaten its academic mission. To that end, Harvard has made, and will continue to make, lasting and robust structural, policy, and programmatic changes to ensure that the university is a welcoming and supportive learning environment for all students and continues to abide in all respects with federal law across its academic programs and operations, while fostering open inquiry in a pluralistic community free from intimidation and open to challenging orthodoxies, whatever their source. Over the past 15 months, Harvard has undertaken substantial policy and programmatic measures. It has made changes to its campus use policies; adopted new accountability procedures; imposed meaningful discipline for those who violate university policies; enhanced programs designed to address bias and promote ideological diversity and civil discourse; hired staff to support these programs and support students; changed partnerships; dedicated resources to combat hate and bias; and enhanced safety and security measures. As a result, Harvard is in a very different place today from where it was a year ago. These efforts, and additional measures the university will be taking against antisemitism, not only are the right thing to do but also are critical to strength…

recognized by the Supreme Court. The government’s terms also circumvent Harvard’s statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law. No less objectionable is the condition, first made explicit in the letter of March 31, 2025, that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our country’s scientific, medical, and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world. These demands extend not only to Harvard but to separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals engaging in life-saving work on behalf of their patients. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle. Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration. William A. Burck Robert K. Hur Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP 1300 I Street NW Suite 900 Suite 900 Washington, DC 20005 King & Spalding LLP 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20006

BREAKING: On Friday, the federal government issued new demands of Harvard University. The university's lawyers just responded: back off.

We are witnessing the destruction of science in America | Paul Darren Bieniasz If we stay on this administration’s course, future life-saving medicines may never be invented

This is not a drill…

Leavitt confirmed that the WH is working on deporting US citizens to El Salvador

GitHub - yangao07/longcallD: A local-haplotagging-based small and structural variant caller A local-haplotagging-based small and structural variant caller - yangao07/longcallD

longcallD is a new variant caller for genomic long reads. It jointly calls phased small and structural variants. Single binary, one command line for the whole process. Comparable accuracy to mainstream callers. Great work by Yan Gao. github.com/yangao07/lon...

When the occasion demands the Machiavellianism of a McConnell but all you have to offer is the ‘make nice’ of a Schumer

Like I’ve said before… Disney characters who don’t know they’re trapped in a Tarantino film

This is the formal end of the Democratic Party on the national stage. There is no constituency for an opposition party that doesn’t oppose.

The institutional Democratic Party is guided by an almost pathological level of conflict avoidance in almost every direction. “What can we do to make the least number of people mad?” is just a bankrupt way to operate.

Democrats Sick Of Being Blamed For Cowardice On Issues They Actually Just Don’t Care About WASHINGTON—Having thus far caved on eliminating the filibuster, advancing an adequate climate change agenda, and protecting voting rights, congressional Democrats told reporters Wednesday they were si...

Where is the lie?

theonion.com/democrats-si...

“You aren’t kissing Dear Leader’s ass enough” is a helluva foreign policy.

Inside the Collapse at NIH Administration officials pressured NIH to avoid clear advice from the agency’s own lawyers to restart grant funding now.

Read every word of this article to see what the Trump folks are doing to the good civil servants at NIH -- and to the important work that protects all of our health. www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

Five alarm fire.

www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

RNA xkcd.com/3056

Graduate student admissions paused and cut back as universities react to Trump orders on research — STAT Acceptances for biomedical graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are being cut back at some universities and medical centers across the country as many grapple with the potential impact of the T...

Biomedical graduate admissions paused or cut back as some universities respond to Trump orders on research - STAT

apple.news/APlQhGHRrSfy...

Thanks for sharing. A little potty mouth is inconsequential compared to the steady erosion of democracy.

Sickening how the mainstream media and our elected representatives have been so passive about this constitutional crisis.

and unconstitutional…

Ah. Clearly DEI mandates led to the hiring of invisible people.

Really sorry to hear, this is very concerning.

"This if Fine" meme with caption "Working on my RPPRs"

how it feels to be working on RPPRs right now.

And to those that claim that Industry is somehow shielded from this, please remember about SBIRs/STTRs and the fact that the whole scientific ecosystem is affected by these attacks.