Megan Dennis

😭 ooh that had to hurt

Juice from a grilled jalapeño once squirted directly into my eye, and I’ve never experienced such pain. I essentially pepper sprayed myself.

Thank you Sil!

Privileged to have had the opportunity to advocate for biomedical research funding in #Congress yesterday! It was an honor to represent the @geneticssociety.bsky.social alongside my amazing colleagues @gregorylab.bskyverified.social and #JillFahrner! 🔬 🧠🧬
#ASHG #Genetics #ResearchMatters

Cell cycle duration determines oncogenic transformation capacity Danian Chen, Suying Lu, Katherine Huang, Joel D. Pearson, Marek Pacal, Phillipos Peidis, Sean McCurdy, Tao Yu, Monika Sangwan, Angela Nguyen, Philippe P. Monnier, Daniel Schramek, Liang Zhu, David Santamaria, Mariano Barbacid, Nagako Akeno, Kathryn A. Wikenheiser-Brokamp & Rod Bremner https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08935-x

A recent paper reveals a surprising insight. The length of the cell cycle in a particular tissue determines the oncogenic transformation capacity of particular oncogenes, with tissues with shorter cell cycles most susceptible 3/n

Great work! Super useful resource. Thank you, team!

Happy Birthday, Rosalind Franklin. She captured an X-ray diffraction image of DNA and stated that a helical structure was probable. Watson and Crick then created a detailed model based on her results. They initially received credit for the discovery and were awarded the Nobel Prize after her death.🧪

A T2T-CHM13 recombination map and globally diverse haplotype reference panel improves phasing and imputation The T2T-CHM13 complete human reference genome contains ~200 Mb of newly resolved sequence, improving read mapping and variant calling compared to GRCh38. However, the benefits of using complete refere...

In work led by @lalli.bsky.social, we present recombination maps and a diverse haplotype reference panel (1000 Genomes Project) for the T2T-CHM13 human reference genome. These resources improve the accuracy of phasing and imputation, especially around common CNVs. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins mediates immunity via the Toll-like receptor pathway Key actors of mammalian immunity originated from bacterial antiphage systems. The full extent of immune system conservation between bacteria and eukaryotes is unknown. Here, we show that the silent in...

Evolutionary molecular biology paying dividends again - this time in finding new modulators of innate immunity - www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Human-specific gene expansions contribute to brain evolution Duplicated genes expanded in the human lineage likely contributed to brain evolution, yet challenges exist in their discovery due to sequence-assembly…

Accessible version here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thank you, Siobhan !!

Human-specific gene expansions contribute to brain evolution A complete human genome and functional modeling in zebrafish pinpoint gene expansions that may underlie the evolutionary innovations of the human brain.

So excited to see this paper out in Cell from the group of my good friend @mydennis.bsky.social It's been so exciting to see this story progress progress. www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Thank you!

Thank you Debby!

thank you, Aida! we're love working with you on these projects

Thank you! 🤩

@tycheleturner.bsky.social‬!

thank you @evobioclio.bsky.social !

Thrilled that our study on human gene duplications and brain evolution is out! It was a true labor of love, with special shout-outs to my co-first author @jmuribescr.bsky.social and my PhD mentor @mydennis.bsky.social. Huge thanks as well to @aidaandres.bsky.social for all the popgen wisdom!

thank you for the shoutout! 🙌 human genomes are way less complex than plant genomes - imagine the fun stuff left to be found in all of those crazy plant genomes

Finding Human Brain Genes in Duplicated DNA What makes the human brain distinctive? A new study published July 21 in Cell identifies two genes linked to human brain features and provides a road map to discover many more. The research could lead...

Also, a nice summary from @ucdavis.bsky.social biology.ucdavis.edu/news/finding...

Shoutout to Gerald Quon and Ricardo Valdarrago who helped us process >10,000 images produced from screening 17 zebrafish models and agnostically flag fish with significant morphometric differences vs controls. Preprint of the method avail here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40501811/

Thrilled to see this story out today! Such a fascinating topic with lots still to discover 🥳

thank you(!) to our many collaborators on this study, including @aidaandres.bsky.social @nicholashaghani.bsky.social @zoebjamal.bsky.social (and many others not on bluesky)

In total, we nominate 148 human-duplicated gene families with possible brain functions; 106 have orthologs in mouse and/or zebrafish. Our hope is this resource facilitates future functional and disease-screen studies of these previously hidden genes.

Testing nine genes in zebrafish (knockout/humanized) resulted in altered morphological and brain features. GPR89B larvae show larger brains with possible increased forebrain progenitor cells, while FRMPD2B fish exhibit increased seizure susceptibility and changes in synaptic signaling genes.

Brain expression analysis found duplicated genes enriched in modules connected with neurogenesis, axonogenesis, and dendrite formation. A subset of genes are co-expressed with autism candidate genes, several of which lie within genomic hotspots of recurrent disease-associated CNVs.

Since ~90% of variants in these regions are inaccessible to short reads, we used long reads to assay variation across ~30 paralogs in 200 modern human, implicating possible balancing selection of immune gene CD8B linked to splicing differences and T-cell marker expression in human cohorts.

LRRC37B is a human modifier of voltage-gated sodium channels and axon excitability in cortical neurons The hominid-specific duplicated gene LRRC37B encodes a membrane receptor expressed selectively at the level of the axon initial segment of pyramidal neurons of the human cerebral cortex. LRRC37B acts ...

This included signatures of strong purifying/positive selection for uncharacterized LRRC37A3 and its paralog LRRC37B, recently found to function in cortical pyramidal neurons by impacting synaptic excitability. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

A complete reference genome improves analysis of human genetic variation Compared to its predecessors, the Telomere-to-Telomere CHM13 genome adds nearly 200 million base pairs of sequence, corrects thousands of structural errors, and unlocks the most complex regions of the...

Querying modern and archaic genome sequences, we identify Homo sapien-specific genes as well as others universal across humans today. Further, we identify genes exhibiting remarkable signatures of selection using 1KGP variants previously identified in T2T-CHM13: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...