Navtej Toor

As Trump Guts Federal Science Agencies, Senator Wiener Introduces Legislation to Create New Science Institute and Authorize Vaccine Purchase and Production Official website of Senator Scott Wiener, representing California Senate District 11.

A positive vision for how to move forward, CA cannot replace the national investment needed to remain the global leader in science and technology but maybe we can help keep the US competitive.

sd11.senate.ca.gov/news/trump-g...

CBC/Radio-Canada is a pillar of our Canadian identity. 
 
We’re going to strengthen our public broadcaster with more long-term funding, and a modernized mandate — to deliver more local news and keep Canadians better informed during emergencies.

Protein-free catalysis of DNA hydrolysis and self-integration by a ribozyme Abstract. Group II introns are ancient self-splicing ribozymes and retrotransposons. Though long speculated to have originated before translation, their de

Out now in
@NAR_Open
! A #ribozyme can self-integrate into and hydrolyze ss- & dsDNA, offering a new avenue for the development of protein-free genome editing tools, and hinting at the possibility of a pre-translation origin of group II introns (G2Is). 🧬🧵 (1/7)
#intron #RNAworld

RNA function follows form – why is it so hard to predict? AlphaFold’s highly accurate structural models transformed protein biology,but RNA lags behind.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Canada is everything.

Drosophila follicle showing retrotransposons (pink & yellow) expressed in somatic cells infecting the oocyte

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬
But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯
Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A short thread 🧵👇

Opinion: Science funding cuts are based on flawed logic. Here’s the truth. Earlier this month, the National Institutes of Health issued supplemental guidance indicating it would immediately impose a 15% cap on indirect costs for research grants, an unprecedented and abrup…

OpEd by @scripps.edu Pres. Pete Shultz: "the consequences would extend beyond Scripps Research, threatening the broader San Diego life sciences ecosystem, which contributes over $27 billion to the regional economy and supports tens of thousands of jobs."
www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/02/25/o...

Public domain photo of Banff national park in Alberta, Canada.

🚨 Amazing Opportunity 🚨
U Alberta is looking for a director for their new #cryoEM facility
Support excellent researchers (who are really nice people) using state-of-the-art infrastructure.
+ reasonable cost of living
+ near some of most beautiful places in world
+ 🇨🇦
apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...

cc: @Gavin Newsome It’s time to build a CDC & NIH in California with the folks who were fired from the feds. In fact, I think each blue state governor needs to scoop up these scientists, healthcare workers and laboratory workers asap. @gavinnewsom.bsky.social

Does anyone know what’s happening with the communications blackout at NIH? A program officer just told me that she can’t discuss anything due to a “communications pause.” I had thought this blackout was over.

How a Canadian scientist and a venomous lizard helped pave the way for Ozempic - National | Globalnews.ca In 1984, Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist from the University of Toronto, discovered a hormone that helped pave the way for popular diabetes drugs such as Ozempic.

This is the most relevant article to NIH and research cuts I’ve seen.

Imagine if this was today , how many people would be saying “Why are we studying Gila Monsters and their impact on diabetes ? That’s wasted money !”

globalnews.ca/news/9793403...

Graphic showing modification of mRNA with ADP-ribose mediated by bacterial enzyme cmdTAC

Check it out! Another novel RNA modification - ADP-ribosylation - that was previously only known on proteins. A cousin to #glycoRNA 👏

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

Quantifying metabolites using structure-switching aptamers coupled to DNA sequencing Nature Biotechnology - Metabolites can be quantified using a combination of aptamers and DNA barcodes.

Delighted to share our latest paper describing a method to read the levels of hundreds of metabolites or drugs in parallel using DNA sequencing. This method, which we call ‘smol-seq’ (Small MOLecule sequencing), harnesses the power of DNA sequencing for metabolite detection:
rdcu.be/d8xLv (1/6)

🧪
If I were Canadian PM I would immediately:

1. Create a new $15B science fund

2. Offer any credentialed US scientist funding for lab startup and replacement of NIH grants if they move to Canada

3. Immediate permanent residency

4. Citizenship after 2 years

Overnight a science superpower

Ten simple rules for developing good reading habits during graduate school and beyond

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Scaffold-enabled high-resolution cryo-EM structure determination of RNA - Nature Communications Determining structures of small, protein-free RNAs by cryo-EM has been challenging. Here, the authors use a group II intron scaffold to achieve high-resolution RNA structures, visualize ligand-induced...

Congratulations to Dan Haack and Boris Rudolfs on the new paper from our lab about the development of a scaffold enabling high resolution cryo-EM structure determination of protein-free RNAs.

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

I don't think that 101 years ago, Otto Warburg was aware how broadly relevant his discovery was. Check out our new paper out today in Nature Metabolism, wherein we engineered the Warburg effect out of mammalian cells to improve biologics production urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

What is the diversity of antiphage systems out there ?

We used protein and genomic language models (and defense score!) to start bringing some answers: >45 000 protein families.

Leb by E. Mordret.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interactive UMAP to have fun
mdmparis.github.io/antiphage-la...