Mike Lacy

Been on multiple search committees

For me (personally so YMMV)…I basically dismiss everything that’s labeled *submitted* unless there’s a preprint I can read

YouTube video by the bumbling biochemist Using ampicillin as a selectable marker? You can skip the post-transformation outgrowth!

Using ampicillin as a selectable marker? You can skip the post-transformation outgrowth! Why? Because Amp targets cell wall synthesis, not protein synthesis, so the bacteria isn’t impeded from making the protein it needs to combat it! youtu.be/XZn8QG6dzgc

Cognitive Helmets for the AI Bicycle: Part 1 I hear people name these three fears: will developers lose their problem-solving skills, learning opportunities, and critical thinking? One science-backed area can help: better metacognitive strategie...

So many developers have sent me that Anthropic skills/mastery case study that I realized I should ungate what I *already wrote* about this: beginning principles to design workflows that work *with* your mind, not against it, & protect your problem-solving

www.fightforthehuman.com/cognitive-he...

Today, I would like to honor the memory of Roger Y. Tsien, born on February 1, 1952. His legacy lives with all who use his technologies, including calcium sensors, fluorescent proteins, the acetoxymethyl (AM) ester, & many more! #FluorescenceFriday
www.nature.com/articles/nme...

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Header image with the paper title: "Improved in vivo gene knockout with high specificity using multiplexed Cas12a sgRNAs"

Make your gene knockouts more efficient with multiplexed Cas12a sgRNAs. Our new paper is out now, with tools available from @addgene.bsky.social , www.plasmids.eu and @vdrc-flies.bsky.social.

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

#CRISPR #geneediting #Drosophila 🧪🧬✂️🔬🪰

Summary 🧵 below.

Sending babies to nursery completely reshapes their microbiomes Socializing at a young age helps to develop greater diversity in their microbiota, according to an analysis of baby-to-baby transmission of gut bacteria.

A few months at nursery gives a roughly 1-year-old baby more new microbes for its gut microbiome than it has acquired in its WHOLE LIFE up until that point from its family. 🤯

🧪 #microbiome #science

My latest for @nature.com

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

Great news! @mariaingaramo.bsky.social 's company (Nonfiction Labs) made a remote-controlled antibody.

Its binding turns on and off with a magnet.

This is a HUGE step towards our dream of magnetically controlled drugs. Imagine a cancer drug that ONLY attacks the tumor, not the rest of your body.

Help requested: my friend is interviewing for TTF positions at private SLACs in the US, and wants to prepare a startup package list that is fitting. Can anyone share startup $ ranges at their SLACs, so it's a reasonable number? Please RT.

‘Shattered’: US scientists speak out about how Trump policies disrupted their careers Researchers lay bare the human toll of lay-offs, funding cuts and attacks on science one year after the president’s return to the White House.

This is so grim. Science isn’t just something nerds do, but the foundation of the modern world. What the Trump regime has done to US science will harm Americans for generations.

Artificial intelligence tools expand scientists’ impact but contract science’s focus - Nature Artificial intelligence boosts individual scientists’ output, citations and career progression, but collectively narrows research diversity and reduces collaboration, concentrating work in data-rich a...

One of my concerns with AI-assisted research in biology is that we're already looking only in the lamplight and AI incentivizes us to narrow the beam. Seems like it's happening...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

blog.addgene.org Addgene’s Expanding Collection of Research Tools for Industry Scientists

Are you an industry scientist? Addgene's mission is to empower scientists with access to research materials, and that means you too! Our repository includes nearly 10,000 tools available to industry laboratories. Check them out in our latest blog post:

2) What's REPROcode? A barcoded, arrayed lentiviral library of 408 immune TFs (now available through Addgene - www.addgene.org/Filipe_Perei...) + scRNA-seq that links which reprogramming TFs a cell receives to the identity it acquires. With no extra barcode PCR steps!

How to lead a journal club you won’t be embarrassed by later One of the jobs facing an early-career scientist, and a developing writer, is to learn what their field’s literature looks like. One of the best tools to that end is the journal club. If you’ve nev…

It's easier to tear down than build up, and in science we have a bad case of that. So: how to lead a journal club that actually finds value in what you read. scientistseessquirre... 🧪

Preprints of pandemic potential - new historical piece from me on the history of bioRxiv/medRxiv, their role in the pandemic, and the way forward. 1/n journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Quantitative Imaging: From Acquisition to Analysis Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses -- a private, non-profit institution with research programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, bioinformatics.

🔬 🖥️ Applications are open for the CSHL course Quantitative Imaging: From Acquisition to Analysis (April 6–21, 2026)!

An intensive, hands-on course covering advanced fluorescence microscopy and quantitative image analysis using open-source tools.

🗓️ Apply online by Jan 30, 2026

The value of publishing negative data - News Scientific journals love news-worthy results. Editors want to publish studies with novel data that scientists will eagerly read and cite in their own work. Because of this desire for novelty, studies ...

Giving the gift of negative data 🥰

Since I joined @lsajournal.org I have handled several stellar manuscripts that report null results. These papers do very well and reviewers almost always appreciate them!

Thanks @rockefeller.edu news team for the article!

www.rockefeller.edu/news/38829-t...

Hues taken randomly from a rainbow color scheme show no intuitive order which renders the RC very impractical for tasks that require associating order to quantitative values.

Interesting to see support for the hypothesis that the rainbow palette isn’t inherently ordered (the colors don’t map to "more" or "less").

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#dataviz 📊 #color 🎨

High prevalence of articles with image-related problems in animal studies of subarachnoid hemorrhage and low rates of correction by publishers Unchallenged erroneous articles can undermine scientific progress and mislead future research. This study shows that image-related issues affect 40% of reviewed articles on early brain injury in anima...

We recently published a paper in @plosbiology.org

We found a lot of problems in animal studies of hemorrhagic stroke.

Research integrity folks found the paper but the neuroscience community seems to have missed it completely.

I'd like them to read it too!

doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003438

*edit: that quote from Tony Ross-Hellauer might have been more recent, the attribution in the linked article wasn't clear. 2025 conference recordings pathos-project.eu/materials-re...

"We need to stop measuring what's easy to measure and start looking for what's important." - Tony Ross-Hellauer [2021]
Example case study: UniProt database saves users €1000s per year in the "time they would have otherwise spent digging up the information from other sources"

A free, open-access library of high-quality organism illustrations for science communication We create vector graphics of model organisms and emerging biological research organisms to enhance our publications. We’re sharing these editable graphics under a CC0 license for other scientists to...

A free, open-access library of high-quality organism illustrations for science communication

On delayed application review, the NIH grant terminations lawsuit appears to be headed for a settlement.

Both plaintiffs and defendants have submitted a joint document outlining their agreement. Judge Young must sign off on it before it takes effect.

Here's what it says and what all this means 🧵

Vote for your favourite 'Featured image' from 2025 - FocalPlane Vote for your favourite 'Featured image' from 2025 - News

We’ve highlighted some wonderful images and researchers in our ‘Featured image’ series in 2025. To celebrate, we’re inviting you to vote for your favourite in our image competition!
#FluorescenceFriday
Check them out here: focalplane.biologists.com/2025/12/19/v...

Linear Z-line-like alignment of capping protein in obliquely striated muscle of the nematode C. elegans suggests that dense bodies are not equivalent to Z-lines Many invertebrates have obliquely striated muscles, in which neighboring thin and thick filaments are staggered and aligned in an oblique manner. This type of muscle allows force production over a wid...

For my cytoskeleton cell biology colleagues, this preprint from Sho Ono at Emory disproves and corrects a long-standing accepted notion (one that I have accepted since 1976 when I started in the actin field).

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

🧵 Cytoskeleton question of the day:
You want to localize your favourite protein.
What do you trust first?
🔹 GFP overexpression
🔹 CRISPR knock-in
🔹 Commercial Antibodies
🔹Homemade antibodies
🔹 Or “all of the above + controls” 👀

Seven feel-good science stories to restore your faith in 2025 Immense progress in gene-editing, drug discovery and conservation are just some of the reasons to be cheerful about 2025.

☺️ 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Last Friday, the @NSF released an RFI for a new Tech Labs Initiative, to "build and scale next-gen independent research organizations to advance science."

An important reminder that the wild and wonderful are often not recapitulated by model organism biology.

The Rudner lab shows that the biogenesis of #anthrax spores has striking differences with the process in B. subtilis

🧪

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH.
And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you.
A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n