Hsiao-Tuan Chao (赵孝端), MD PhD

different coloured mice on a white background

Turns out, two of pain’s most famous messengers — Substance P and CGRPα — might not be so essential after all. Mice missing both still felt pain just fine, challenging decades of assumptions about how pain signals travel.
buff.ly/ypISrtx

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.”
A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world.
www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...

Doctor Behind Award-Winning Parkinson’s Research Among Scientists Purged From NIH Leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the US’s leading medical research agency, were swept up Tuesday in the Trump administration’s latest firing blitz.

11 of about 55 PIs terminated at NINDS yesterday, with downstream effects for all of us in terms of the lost research into neurological disease and stroke. 1/ www.wired.com/story/doctor...

A revolutionary new understanding of autism in girls By studying the brains of autistic girls, we now know the condition presents differently in them than in boys, suggesting that huge numbers of women have gone undiagnosed

Neuroscientists studying autism have missed a crucial fact - the condition looks different in boys and girls especially when it comes to the social brain.

Figure depicting LARRYv2 Library components

New pooled libraries available from the @alejofraticelli.bsky.social lab! These plasmid libraries can be used by scientists to produce lentiviral barcoding particles to barcode mammalian cells for clonal and state-fate analysis, using single-cell RNA sequencing

www.addgene.org/pool...

🚨Proud mentor alert!🚨Congratulations to rising star 🌟 @jeff-kuerbitz.bsky.social in Child Neurology & neurogenetics @bcmhouston.bsky.social for receiving the competitive NeuralCODR fellowship @houstonmethodist.bsky.social! Stellar chalk talk! Kudos! 👏👏👏 #DuncanNRI #cerebellum #autism #rarediseases

Stay safe from online hate with these five tips In this era of anti-science activism, it‘s wise to take steps to protect your research and reputation in the digital realm.

All scientists, regardless of their discipline or location, are potential targets for online hate. But there are things you can do to protect yourself, and resources that can help. Nature provides five steps to get started. #Academicsky 🧪

Why don't we remember being babies? Brain scans reveal new clues Why can't we remember when we were babies? Scientists who scanned infants' brains found that they do make memories. The findings suggest these memories may still exist, but are inaccessible to us.

You can't remember your infancy, but does that mean that babies don't form memories? If only we could scan their brains to learn what they can't yet tell us. Well, actually...

Check out this NPR segment on the amazing work of @tristansyates.bsky.social and my friend & colleague Nick Turk-Browne!

Raising awareness on February 28, 2025 Rare Disease Day for the 300 million people with #rarediseases and their families to find answers and promote positive change! @bcmhouston.bsky.social @bcmgenetics.bsky.social

Tracking Texas' biggest measles outbreak in 30 years: Cases, vaccine rates Gaines County is the epicenter of the current measles outbreak. It also has the highest share of students who received vaccine exemptions for nonmedical reasons.

We're tracking measles cases across Texas amid an outbreak that has prompted health officials to issue warnings about the highly contagious respiratory illness. www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/202...

Congrats to BCM medical students Melina Corriveau & Joshua Korb for leading a great team of collaborators in identifying MEF2C-AS1 and #chromothripsis in 5q14.3 microdeletion syndrome. Providing key answers for #rarediseases #epilepsy 👏👏@bcmgenetics.bsky.social @bcmhouston.bsky.social

👩‍🔬 International Day of Women and Girls in Science

On this International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we honour the incredible contributions of women shaping the future of science.

#WomenInScience #GirlsInSTEM #WomenInSTEM #STEMinspiration #BreakingBarriers #STEMHeroes #WomenInResearch

NIH slashes overhead payments for research, sparking outrage Move to cut indirect cost rate to 15% could cost universities billions of dollars

The National Institutes of Health plans to severely cut the percentage of its grant money that can be used for overhead costs rather than research.

Here is the hastily prepared script I just read to my reps after introducing myself:

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

CNN has now confirmed this.

www.cnn.com/2025/01/24/h...

Pediatricians Try New Tactics To Win Over Vaccine Skeptical Parents As trust in medicine declines and vaccine hesitancy spreads, doctors are changing how they talk about lifesaving childhood shots.

As trust in medicine declines and vaccine hesitancy spreads, doctors are changing how they talk about lifesaving childhood shots.

And the funding announcement for diversity supplements now has been updated to expire today. Supplements are so important to the careers of junior scientists. This is crushing for post docs and early career faculty

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Featured Director's Message

#NIH #NINDS paylines are at 8% for fiscal 2025. Tough year is due to increased research costs and federal budget uncertainty for FY 2025. Director's message here. Worth reading. www.ninds.nih.gov/news-events/...

Title of the paper.

This is one of the nearly 800 papers that I found during a study in which I scanned over 20,000 papers for such image duplications. About half of these papers are now corrected or retracted.

The study is published here:
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Neural Guidance of Lymphatics

#SchwannCell CXCL12⏫ Sprouting/Patterning of CXCR4+ #LymphaticEndothelialCell

Prox1-CreERT2:Cxcr4f/f🐭
⬇️ Lymphatic Valve formation
⬇️ VEGF-C-induced #Lymphangiogenesis

Xiaolei Liu lab Development 2024 @biologists.bsky.social
journals.biologists.com/dev/article-...

A few days ago, the journal eLife published a self-study on the first year of its new publishing model, and it is well worth a look. Here are some notes based on my own experience with the journal as author and reviewing editor: markusmeister.com/2024/03/17/a....