Alex Starr

MBE | A General Principle of Neuronal Evolution Reveals a Human-Accelerated Neuron Type Potentially Underlying the High Prevalence of Autism in Humans

@astarr2.bsky.social & Fraser used single-cell RNAseq to determine if abundant cell-types have more conserved gene expression patterns in primates; their findings also argue for a link between the evolution of human cognition and autism.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf189

#evobio #molbio #autism

10.09.2025 09:58 — 👍 5    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 0

Thank you so much for the kind words!

13.09.2025 01:25 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Congratulations to Nathan for conceiving and designing this unified demultiplexing toolkit!

24.03.2025 22:12 — 👍 7    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0

Watching axons on the move

Check out this study, ranked ‘Fundamental’, on how the ligand Netrin mediates axon guidance through haptotaxis and chemotaxis.
elifesciences.org/articles/100...

19.03.2025 21:01 — 👍 25    🔁 8    💬 0    📌 2

Prohormone cleavage prediction uncovers a non-incretin anti-obesity peptide - Nature Computational drug discovery is used to identify a 12-mer peptide derived from BRINP2 with potent anti-obesity effects that are independent of leptin, glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor and melanocortin...

Exciting discovery by Svensson lab and collaborators @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social, computational discovery of 2500 new bioactive peptides, including 12-mer named BRP that reduces food intake leading to weight loss w/o nausea in mice!

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

11.03.2025 23:22 — 👍 105    🔁 34    💬 1    📌 5

This is an awesome approach! I’d be very curious if the causal gene expression change-phenotype links could be used to predict hemoglobin in other species. E.g. if you take all the causal links, compare expression between humans and mice, can you predict what hemoglobin levels in mice are?

26.01.2025 00:21 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Modern GWAS can identify 1000s of significant hits but it can be hard to turn this into biological insight. What key cellular functions link genetic variation to disease?

I'm very excited to present our new work combining associations and Perturb-seq to build interpretable causal graphs! A 🧵

26.01.2025 00:13 — 👍 320    🔁 118    💬 6    📌 10

Glad I could play a role in helping to explore the great findings enabled by this awesome new tool! Excited to see what cool biology will be uncovered using sc-SPLASH in the ever expanding single cell RNA-seq datasets, particularly from emerging and non-model organisms!

24.12.2024 21:08 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

sc-SPLASH provides ultra-efficient reference-free discovery in barcoded single-cell sequencing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.24.630263v1

24.12.2024 19:47 — 👍 2    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 1

I’d love to be added!

26.11.2024 19:10 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Similarly, tons of very conserved regions lack any annotation. One factor might be that there are a lot of important contexts that haven’t been profiled sufficiently (e.g. during brain wiring which has incredibly complex gene expression patterns, immune cells stimulated with many compounds, etc.)

19.11.2024 22:23 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0