Logan Thrasher Collins

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

Wow, this is amazing! At the age of 17, Hannah Cairo solved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a 40 year-old problem in harmonic analysis! Congratulations to her on this accomplishment! #math
www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

Cross-laminated timber - Wikipedia

Cross-laminated timber - a promising material for future sustainable skyscrapers! (Yes, it's highly fire resistant).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-l...

Antagonism as a foraging strategy in microbial communities In natural habitats, nutrient availability limits bacterial growth. We discovered that bacteria can overcome this limitation by acquiring nutrients by lysing neighboring cells through contact-dependen...

Fascinating paper where the authors show that many bacteria can attack other ‘prey’ bacteria (using T6SS as a weapon) and feed on the nutrients released by the destroyed prey. This behavior appears widespread across environments such as soil, ocean, etc. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

SHIELD: Skull-shaped hemispheric implants enabling large-scale electrophysiology datasets in the mouse brain High-density electrode arrays such as Neuropixels are transformative for neuroscience research, but optimized surgical and experimental methodologies are necessary to fully harness the power of these ...

Bennett et al. from the Allen Institute engineer a mouse skull-shaped implant with holes for multiple Neuropixels probes, a device which can facilitate neuroscientific investigations into cooperation between multiple brain regions. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Roundup of Interesting Research Papers #2 My second installment of some interesting research papers that I have read over the past few weeks and would like to share with my community.

Roundup of interesting research papers #2. My second installment of interesting research papers I've read over the past few weeks and would like to share with my community. substack.com/home/post/p-...

F-NpCu1 is a useful tool for studying diseases which involve dysregulated copper levels such as metabolic disorders, neurodegenerative disorders, and cancers. #chemistry #chemicalbiology

Imaging Copper Levels during Life in the Brain and beyond Using a Fluorescent Copper Sensor with Multimodal Capacity Copper is an essential trace element for normal development and function throughout the body, including the central nervous system (CNS). Alterations to cellular copper levels result in severe neurol...

Imaging Copper Levels during Life in the Brain and beyond Using a Fluorescent Copper Sensor with Multimodal Capacity Adair et al. created a fluorescent small molecule sensor F-NpCu1 which measures bioavailable copper both in vitro and in vivo. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Stowaways in the cargo: Contaminating nucleic acids in rAAV preparations for gene therapy Brimble and colleagues review nucleic acid heterogeneity of rAAV for gene therapy. Alongside the intended expression cassette, non-therapeutic DNA is present within rAAV preparations. These contaminan...

A useful review on the nucleic acid contaminants found in AAVs, how to detect such contaminants, their biological implications, and how we can minimize nucleic acid contaminants in the future through new manufacturing innovations! #biotech #genetherapy
www.cell.com/molecular-th...

Sheng et al. also mentioned that early work in adapting the technology for rodent models is underway! #bioelectronics

Flexible bioelectronic devices were placed onto Xenopus (and Axolotl) embryonic neural plates. As the embryos developed, invagination of the plates facilitated internalization of the devices into tadpole brain, facilitating deep recording and stimulation in developing central nervous systems.

A wonderfully futuristic paper by Sheng et al.! Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Brain implantation of soft bioelectronics via embryonic development"

Making the Centrifuge The modern centrifuge was first designed for milkfat separation in the dairy industry. Today, it is ubiquitous in research laboratories. To whom do we owe its astonishing versatility?

An informative article on the history of the centrifuge and how it has come to be used for many different applications today. #science #chemistry #instrumentation

www.asimov.press/p/centrifuge

We Can, Must, and Will Simulate Nematode Brains—Asterisk Scientists have spent over 25 years trying — and failing — to build computer simulations of the smallest brain we know. Today, we finally have the tools to pull it off.

An excellent article by Michael Alexander Skuhersky on whole-brain emulation of C. elegans, how to get there, and why it matters. asteriskmag.com/issues/09/we...

MIT launches a “moonshot for menstruation science” The Fairbairn Menstruation Science Fund will advance groundbreaking research at MIT on the function of the human uterus and its impact on sex-based differences in human immunology that contribute to g...

Great job to all involved in setting this up! "The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative has announced the establishment of the Fairbairn Menstruation Science Fund, supporting a bold, high-impact initiative designed to revolutionize women’s health research."
news.mit.edu/2025/mit-lau...

Better antibodies by engineering targets, not engineering antibodies (Nabla Bio) 4k words, 19 minutes reading time

Deep dive by Abhishaike Mahajan ("Owl Posting") into Nabla Bio's unique computational strategy for engineering soluble versions of transmembrane proteins to facilitate more efficacious antibody screening. Very interesting exploration here! www.owlposting.com/p/better-ant...

Lipid nanoparticle screening in nonhuman primates with minimal loss of life - Nature Biotechnology End-of-life nonhuman primates can be used to screen pools of lipid nanoparticles for clinical safety studies.

Promising strategy for accelerating translational lipid nanoparticle research by screening pooled barcoded batches in terminally ill nonhuman primates (NHPs). This minimizes the NHPs needed for experiments and avoids harming healthy NHPs with years of life ahead.

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

Beyond increasing the effective resolution, the expansion process makes available epitopes for polyclonal antibody labeling which would otherwise have been buried inside of proteins. #microscopy

Molecular Decrowding by Tissue Expansion Allows Precise Determination of the Spatial Distribution of Synaptic Proteins at a Nanometer Scale by exTEM To understand how the molecular machinery of synapses works, it is essential to determine an inventory of synaptic proteins at a subsynaptic resolution. Nevertheless, synaptic proteins are difficult t...

Kim et al. report a method (exTEM) which combines expansion microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and immunogold labeling to precisely determine the relative spatial locations of proteins in synapses.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Scientists Discover Unknown Organelle Inside Our Cells The discovery of an unknown organelle inside our cells could open the door to new treatments for devastating inherited diseases.

Hemifusomes, a newly discovered organelle, help our cells "our cells sort, recycle and discard important cargo"! #cellbiology #molecularbiology
newsroom.uvahealth.com/2025/06/25/s...

Roundup of Interesting Research Papers #1 Some interesting research papers that I have read over the past few weeks and would like to share with my community. I'm planning to post regular installments of this here!

Roundup of Interesting Research Papers #1
Some interesting research papers that I have read over the past few weeks and would like to share with my community. I'm planning to post regular installments of this!

Congenitally, chemically, or surgically deafened mice are also problematic since they have systemic defects that can also interfere with interpreting experimental results. Guo et al.'s mice also express brain-wide calcium indicator proteins for easy measurement of neuronal activity. #neurotech

By comparison, ordinary mouse models give misleading results when studying brain responses to ultrasound since ultrasound can trigger auditory pathways in rodents.

Congenitally, chemically, or surgically deafened mice are also problematic since they have systemic defects that can also interfere with interpreting experimental results. Guo et al.'s mice also express brain-wide calcium indicator proteins for easy measurement of neuronal activity. #neurotech

Guo et al. developed a transgenic mouse model which can be inducibly deafened for more informative studies of ultrasonic neuromodulation. Link: doi.org/10.1016/j.is...

The Virus Zoo: A Primer on Molecular Virology This content is also available on my website: https://logancollinsblog.com/2022/07/27/the-virus-zoo-a-quick-primer-on-molecular-virology/

The Virus Zoo is now available on my Substack!
Link: loganthrashercollins.substack.com/p/the-virus-... #virology #biology #molecularbiology

Epithelial cells provide immunocompetence to the early embryo for bacterial clearance Early embryos are exposed to environmental perturbations that may influence their development, including bacteria. Despite lacking a proper immune sys…

Fascinating paper on how embryonic surface epithelial cells can phagocytose and destroy bacteria, providing a way for early embryos to defend themselves from bacterial contamination before the main immune system has developed. #biology www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Large-scale high-density brain-wide neural recording in nonhuman primates - Nature Neuroscience Neuropixels 1.0 NHP is a 45-mm, high-density silicon probe capable of recording large numbers of neurons with single-neuron resolution from most areas in a macaque’s brain.

An impressive report on engineering a version of the Neuropixels device for large-scale brain recording in nonhuman primates. Its utility as a tool was demonstrated in four interesting nonhuman primate neuroscience experiments. #neurotech #neuroscience
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I invite you to sit amongst the butterflies

The universe is just things bumping into each other and sometimes sticking - much like people.

Had a great time presenting one of my PhD research projects at the International Adenovirus Meeting in Cardiff, Wales! "Covalently linked adenovirus-AAV complexes as a novel platform technology for gene therapy". (Cloth poster ended up a bit ruffled, but still turned out well).