Bella Rauch

#Immunosky people! 6th International Conference on Innate Lymphoid Cells - ILC6 in Vancouver.
ilc6vancouver.com
First program draft online. Abstract submission and registration officially open!
#ILC6 #ILC6Vancouver #2026ILC6

a man with long hair and a beard is holding a cup and the word dude is on the bottom ALT: a man with long hair and a beard is holding a cup and the word dude is on the bottom

When 3 students discuss right behind me in the tram whether they should flunk my class today🤦‍♀️

Reminder to register for the Midwinter Conference of Immunologists at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, CA! Join us for some great science and the opportunity to talk to junior and senior colleagues in a beautiful setting!!
www.midwconfimmunol.org

Summer Undergraduate Research Experience | HHMI The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.

Calling all rising juniors & seniors: Interested in biological or biomedical research? Applications for our ’26 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Program are now open! Nine weeks, hands-on research, & mentorship from some of the nation’s top scientists — learn more: bit.ly/CechFellows

BREAKING: Stand up for Science endorses @aftynbehn.bsky.social (TN-07) for Congress. From speaking at our Nashville rally in March, to advocating for our health and hospitals, Behn is a fighter for science!

Tennessee — election day is December 2nd! In-person early voting runs from now until 11/26.

The Vienna BioCenter Summer School 2026 call is now open for talented undergrads, it's a great opportunity for students who are interested in graduate study in the life sciences. Please RT
https://training.vbc.ac.at/summer-school/

“Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops After reviewing coverage from the network and hours of social media videos that preceded Trump’s decision, ProPublica found that Fox’s portrayal of “Portland rioters” routinely instigating violence was misleading.

NEW: ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed over 700 videos posted on social media.

The network used five-year-old footage, mislabeled other dates and implied footage from elsewhere was in Portland.

Early registration deadline for midwconfimmunol.org
@midwinter-immun.bsky.social is this Friday!

Seattle friends, please read!!

the neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content

This @skynewsrss.bsky.social analysis confirms that X's algorithm is blatantly boosting far-right content

If you are still posting or engaging there, you are volunteering your time and effort towards actively assisting a racist, white supremacist project

STOP ALREADY

news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Yeah, we also put a disclaimer in the discussion that people that take part in our experiment probably already are biased towards wanting something different. However, it was also extra work for everyone, so it might have made them grumpy about it in the process 😉.

Not sure whether I’d call it an intervention study - more a comparative study. In several of our assessments we asked authors as well as reviewers to compare the discovery stack system with traditional review. Not the most perfect control, of course.

Can we improve peer review? We think we can! Check out an experiment I helped with as part of @solvingforsci.bsky.social 's mission to make science better.
And if you don't want to read the whole bioRxiv manuscript, here's an overview of the main findings:
solvingfor.org/news-posts-d...

Dismantling of US federal agencies will ‘destroy science’ From NASA to the National Institutes of Health, federal agencies conduct research that universities cannot. Agency scientists speak out about the irreplaceable facilities, institutional knowledge and ...

"Science is being destroyed across many agencies" say federal researchers.

For my latest @nature.com piece, I spoke to 19 different scientists across EPA, NOAA, NIH, NASA, and USGS to document how science is being dismantled across US federal agencies.

A group of carved pumpkins, lit

Results of the yearly Rauch-Pruneda carving party

Excited to share the peer-reviewed version of our work, now online in @embojournal.org! Big thanks to our reviewers and @hvodermaier.bsky.social for facilitating this process. Looking forward to continuing this fun collaboration with @michaelnadbio.bsky.social!
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

➡️ It only takes 5 minutes, and all links are in our bio
1. Sign the petition to #impeachthequack RFK Jr & have him removed from office.
2. Mark your calendar to join us on November 5th as we march on Congress to deliver our petitions.
3. Become a member of our Science Fight Club!
Easy peasy!

Buildings, trees and a rainbow

Portland waterfront and a rainbow

#Portland Still not on fire, but we got good colors going 🌈

🙋‍♀️

Deadline for the underrepresented trainee travel grant is tomorrow!!

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I want to highlight again that this was an excellent collaboration building on Genentech's screening and ubiquitin and my lab's organoid and infection expertise.
Rockstar graduate student Marin Miner and techs Rachael Peterson and William Scott did all the real work in the Rauch lab!

8/8 The END

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Indeed! NleL deficient bacteria cause more cell extrusion than WT in organoids, and less epithelial colonization in vivo.
In mice deficient in ROCK1/2 in gut epithelia, the disadvantage of NleL deficiency is gone!
Thus, bacteria use NleL to suppress epithelial extrusion, which aids in spread!

7/8

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These kinases had already been implicated in apoptotic cell extrusion. We show in organoid models that they are also needed for rapid extrusion post inflammasome activation. During epithelial infection with Citrobacter (an E.coli relative), they are degraded.
Will this have consequences?

6/8

a brown dog is sitting on a blanket and looking at the camera with the words what 's going on here ? Alt: a brown dog is sitting on a blanket and looking at the camera with the words what 's going on here ?

Originally, Giovanni was screening for inflammasome inhibitors among E.coli effectors, using LPS induced cell death as readout.
NleL, a known ubiquitin ligase, was a hit. MS analysis and WB show it ubiquitinates and thus degrades Caspase-4.

But it ALSO targets kinases ROCK1 and ROCK2?

5/8

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But what about signals further down in the extrusion pathway? To remove the infected cell from the mono-layered intestinal epithelium without causing a leaky hole, the extruding cell and it's neighbors have to rapidly rearrange their cytoskeleton.
Cue our new story:

4/8

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This protection through the inflammasome creates evolutionary pressure on pathogens.
Accordingly, there’s examples of bacterial attack on inflammasome components, such as Shigella degrading human Gasdermins and antagonizing Caspase-4.

3/8

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2017 we showed intestinal epithelial cells rapidly extrude into the lumen after NAIP–NLRC4 activation, which protects from Salmonella.
We built on work from @leighknodler.bsky.social +@sellinlab.bsky.social.
Later, @psmitchej.bsky.social showed this as the reason for mouse Shigella resistance!

2/8

Enteropathogenic bacteria evade ROCK-driven epithelial cell extrusion - Nature The bacterial ubiquitin ligase NleL evades host defence mechanisms both by inhibiting pyroptosis and by preventing infected intestinal epithelial cells from being extruded into the lumen and expelled ...

Check out our new publication, a collaboration with Giovanni Luchetti and Vishva Dixit @ Genentech.
We show that the E.coli effector NleL inhibits intestinal epithelial cell extrusion after #inflammasome activation via degrading the kinases ROCK1 and 2!!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Explainer 1/8

6 people at a Dinner table on a beach

A beach

Me pointing out a giant monstera leaf

I had to miss the #nokings protests because I was in Brazil at the SBI congress.
Fantastic speakers and poster sessions, and dancing! Saw old friends and made new ones.
It gives me hope to see how well Brazilian science is doing after their own wannabe king interlude.