Will Macnair

This afternoon I took my mom to the ballet. She was as a dancer and choreographer for decades & has been in memory care for 8 years. She can’t recall many details of her past but dance—and her identity as a dancer—lives in her soul 1/
#alzheimers

Human CSF proteogenomics links genetic variation to neurodegenerative disease proteins #NeuroDegeneration 🧪🧠
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.12.26345733v1

Predicting when symptoms of Alzheimer's disease will occur with a single elevated p-tau217 blood test and a person's age, even 20+ years in advance
@naturemedicine.bsky.social

nature.com/articles/s41...

Three postdoctoral fellowships in quantitative biology are available as part of a new Quantitative Biology Initiative in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland.

Best consideration date: 3/14

Job Ad:
umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j...

Department:
biology.umd.edu/people

Universität Basel: PhD position in systems biology (Zampieri Lab) The Department of Biomedicine is a joint effort between the University of Basel and the University Hospitals Basel. It unites basic and clinical scientists to advance our understanding of health and d...

The Zampieri Lab at the University of Basel is recruiting a highly motivated PhD candidate to investigate how metabolic programs drive cancer metastasis.
📩 Only applications submitted through the official recruiting system of the University of Basel will be considered.
jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...

Very excited to get to share culmination of this large-scale project to understand spatial gene expression in schizophrenia. Really proud of the amazing team work here working out lots of roadblocks to deploy these spatial strategies and analysis methods at scale!

how to draw an owl meme. Step 1: Draw some circles. Step 2: Draw the rest of the owl

Everything is awful but there's a chance we will get this image on the cover of a special issue about statistical workflow. Really the best advertising decision the journal could make. I hope they go for it

Delighted to present Latent Interaction Variational Inference (LIVI), a framework for trans-eQTL mapping at single-cell resolution that I developed during my PhD together with colleagues from @steglelab.bsky.social 1/n

Postdoc alert in spatial biology!

Building upon our previous work with MSI cancers (e.g. de Vries et al, Nature, 2023), the Voest Group at the NKI is hiring a (fully funded) postdoctoral fellow with strong expertise in spatial cancer biology.

Learn more / apply here: www.nki.nl/careers-stud...

Parameter-free representations outperform single-cell foundation models on downstream benchmarks #SingleCell 🧪🧬🖥️
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.11.705358v1

Myelin sheaths in the central nervous system can withstand damage and dynamically remodel Myelin damage is a hallmark of several neurological disorders, but how it occurs remains to be fully understood. In this study, we found that early damage in zebrafish and rodent demyelination models ...

Latest from the lab, led by @ara-donia.bsky.social and @juliavdkorput.bsky.social

Huge team effort, with immense contributions by friends from nearby and around the globe.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

"Moderna's CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: 'You cannot make a return on investment if you don't have access to the U.S. market. Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.” 9:12 AM Feb 12, 2026 604.8K Views

In terms of what cures are being lost:

- Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis
- herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis
- shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

Omnibenchmark (omnibenchmark.org): transparent, reproducible, extensible and standardized orchestration of solo and collaborative benchmarks arxiv.org/abs/2409.17038 🧬💻🧪

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

Genomics link obesity and type 2 diabetes to Alzheimer's disease to unveil novel biological insights #NeuroDegeneration 🧪🧠
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.10.26344393v1

Omnibenchmark: transparent, reproducible, extensible and standardized orchestration of solo and collaborative benchmarks Benchmarking involves designing, running and disseminating rigorous performance assessments of methods, most often for data analysis and software tools, but the process can also be applied to experime...

So, this should be quite interesting!

We just posted a BIG update to our Omnibenchmark "framework", basically a software layer to help you manage, build, standardize, and orchestrate reproducible and extensible (computational method) benchmarks .. (quite a mouthful) ..

arxiv.org/abs/2409.17038

Universität Basel: Bioinformatician (100%) The Department of Biomedicine (DBM) is a joint effort between the University of Basel and the University Hospitals Basel. It unites basic and clinical scientists to advance our understanding of health...

We have a 3-years position open in our facility. Come join us to do great science in a nice team!
jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...

🖥️🧬🚀 I am excited to share that our #omnideconv study is finally published on Genome Biology: doi.org/10.1186/s130...

We’re hiring: Research Group Leader in computational biology.

Are you generating more research ideas than you can explore? Lead cutting-edge AI & biology research at EMBL-EBI.

Apply by 11 April 2026: embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

#ScienceCareers @ewaldlab.org @embl.org

A ML-framework for the discovery of next-generation IBD targets using a harmonized single-cell atlas of patient tissue #SingleCell 🧪🧬🖥️
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.06.699999v1

Atlas-guided discovery of transcription factors for T cell programming - Nature A comprehensive atlas platform integrating transcriptional and epigenetic data enables more precise engineering of T cell states, accelerating the rational design of more effective cellular immunother...

Amazing work for the T cell experts:

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

Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge | Quanta Magazine New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial…

For a long time, astrocytes were considered mere support and scaffolding for all-important neurons. The new experiments reveal in great detail the cells’ influence over neuronal signaling in the brain.

🧬 2026 Internship: Marioni Group @genentech.bsky.social Seeking PhD intern for Deep Learning on large-scale genetic screens (Perturb-seq/Optical).
Focus: ML for single-cell + imaging to decode phenotypes.
📍 SSF (On-site) | 12-wk paid
⚠️ Apply via portal only: 🔗 bit.ly/45P7TQB
#CompBio #AI #Genetics

We're donating PyDESeq2 to @scverse.bsky.social for long-term maintenance & development. Python reimplementation of DESeq2, ecosystem member since 2023, now in the hands of one of the best open source communities in omics. Good science requires good open source. github.com/scverse/PyDE...

mosaicMPI: a framework for modular data integration across cohorts and -omics modalities Abstract. Advances in molecular profiling have facilitated generation of large multi-modal datasets that can potentially reveal critical axes of biological

I have used the one implemented in mosaicmpi, because it is more up to date than the original. It’s fine but a little bit hacky if just using the cNMF functionality. If you find something else, let me know!

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

What do you especially like about how they do modules? They use Hotspot, which a colleague recommended to me but I haven't yet tried out. I've been very happy with the results of cNMF (although a bit less happy with the implementations I've found... 😅)

I have a serious question for the bioinformatics community - it is now very trendy to assign genes to modules or groups and then annotate those groups using various strategies. When I read the methods for papers it is unclear to me how one comes up with the strategy they use - see below:

I think that of you use modules that make sense to you given your understanding of the context, and somewhere note “other equally valid sets of modules are possible”, then they are fine and can be helpful 😊

However, I don’t think there is any way to show that the modules you have are correct / unique / objective. So I don’t think anyone should try 😅

What would ground truth look like for testing and validating this? I just think it’s impossible.