Oded Rechavi

A human-specific regulatory mechanism revealed in a pre-implantation model - Nature Genetic manipulation of blastoids reveals the role of recently emerged transposable elements and genes in human development.

This paper uncovers that HERVK LTR5Hs, a hominoid-specific retrovirus, act as epiblast enhancers with a crucial function in human pre-implantation development - stunning!
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

"You're in charge of the autoclave"

Thanking the reviewers

Remote control of AMPK via extracellular adenosine controls tissue growth - Nature Cell Biology Zhang et al. demonstrate that AMPK can be activated by signalling metabolite, adenosine, under non-stress conditions during Drosophila development. The intestine regulates adenosine levels, thus, remotely controlling wing disc AMPK activation and growth.

I absolutely loved reading this one recently!

The authors show how AMPK (which is traditionally viewed as an stress-activated kinase) is also developmentally regulated by circulating adenosine levels in Drosophila.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One-shot design of functional protein binders with BindCraft - Nature BindCraft, an open-source, automated pipeline for de novo protein binder design with experimental success rates of 10–100%, leverages AlphaFold2 weights to generate binders with nanomolar affinity without the need for high-throughput screening.

This graced our journal club recently

YouTube video by Remote Chess Academy Only Mikhail Tal Could Solve This Crazy Puzzle! [Even Kasparov Failed]

If you like chess check out Igor Smirnov's brilliant channel, for example this crazy puzzle (and the historic story around it): youtu.be/IyyRCwKtChM?...

Yes, it's shut down, hopefully temporarily

Acute Inflammation Alters Brain Energy Metabolism in Mice and Humans: Role in Suppressed Spontaneous Activity, Impaired Cognition, and Delirium Systemic infection triggers a spectrum of metabolic and behavioral changes, collectively termed sickness behavior, which while adaptive, can affect mood and cognition. In vulnerable individuals, acute...

Ok so this is almost certainly not up your street but I LOVE this paper because it is simple, beautifully written and super clear. It's just a good paper and I fangirled the senior author about it in an email to him

www.jneurosci.org/content/40/2...

Don't forget to check out the recommendations from the preLights team on our sister site @prelights.bsky.social.
prelights.biologists.com

Also, if you are interested in bioimage analysis, our latest preprint list will be dropping soon!

bsky.app/profile/yehu...

luckily, there are alternatives to PubMed, see libguides.exeter.ac.uk/c.php?g=7252...

Emergence of plasmid stability under non-selective conditions maintains antibiotic resistance - Nature Communications It is expected that plasmids are costly and therefore that selection is required to maintain them within bacterial populations. Here, Wein et al. show that plasmid stability can emerge even in the absence of positive selection and that loss may be determined by transcription-replication conflict.

I really love this experimental study on emergence of plasmid stability by @daganlab.bsky.social

They cleverly mimicked fluctuations in antibiotic levels to catch the evolution of stable plasmids that still carry antibiotic resistance.

Very insightful for plasmid evolution!

Discovery of functional NLRs using expression level, high-throughput transformation and large-scale phenotyping Nature Plants - Rapid discovery of functional resistance genes is enabled by a high-expression signature and high-throughput transformation. This approach identified 31 new resistance genes for...

This one by @helenbrabs.bsky.social !

that's amazing

Giant DNA viruses encode a hallmark translation initiation complex of eukaryotic life In contrast to living organisms, viruses were long thought to lack protein synthesis machinery and instead depend on host factors to translate viral transcripts. Here, we discover that giant DNA virus...

Giant DNA viruses encode a hallmark translation initiation complex of eukaryotic life

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Friday Papers Club! 🍿In light of Pubmed going down, the collapse of social media, and my recent success at getting recommendations for interesting papers from those still around, I am starting a new tradition! - Recommend a good scientific manuscript! 👇

"Republic has no need for savants and chemists"

(the political court that sentenced Antoine
Lavoisier to the guillotine, 1794)

*from Paul Nurse's new book

it's open for interpretation

How it fees when Researchgate emails to tell you two people viewed your article

The lab's bioinformatician analyzing the students' data

Reviewer rejecting your paper at the push of a button.

Such an amazing movie (I don't remember enjoying a movie like this for a long time)

Trying to log into Eduroam

Electroreception: Worms leap to insects for dispersal www.cell.com/current-biol...

Extreme autotomy and whole-body regeneration in photosynthetic sea slugs www.cell.com/current-biol...

Leaf Mimicry in a Climbing Plant Protects against Herbivory www.cell.com/current-biol...

Got to love studies that were clearly conducted "for the love of the game" (“self-decapitating sea slugs”, “plants that see and use that for mimicry”, “worms that jump in the air”, aka papers you sometimes find in @currentbiology.bsky.social
) References to all of this bellow👇

Career in academia

Mechanosensitive genomic enhancers potentiate the cellular response to matrix stiffness Epigenetic control of gene expression and cellular phenotype is influenced by changes in the local microenvironment, yet how mechanical cues precisely influence epigenetic state to regulate transcript...

And from other labs’ work this is really cool:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Reviewers asking for additional experiments