jared toettcher

Senior Director - Scientific Officer Primary Work Address: 4000 Jones Bridge Road, Chevy Chase, MD, 20815 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) advances the disco...

Great Job - Great Colleagues - Great Science👍
Help us pick the next generation of @hhmi.org Investigators, Freeman Hrabowski Scholars, Hanna Gray Fellows, Gilliam Fellows
Relocation to DC is required, perfect for academic PIs looking for their next chapter
hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...

screenshots of some of the sample implementations

Screenshot of smartmicroscopy.github.io/implementations.html, showing an overview of collected implementation examples

Want to get started with smart microscopy? 🧠🔬
Check out our online repository with implementations from labs and industry -- lots of practical tips and links to sample code! smartmicroscopy.github.io/implementati...

More details in the ✨updated preprint!✨
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚀 Our new paper is out @natmethods.nature.com!

Kuffer & Marzilli engineered conditionally stable MS2 & PP7 coat proteins (dMCP & dPCP) that degrade unless bound to RNA, enabling ultra–low-background, single-mRNA imaging in live cells.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧬 www.addgene.org/John_Ngo/

SCHEPHERD--the bioelectric cell herding platform built for YOU. Single cells, monolayers, organoids--this herds them all + new tricks. Plz try it-- we will *give* you parts! Teaser here of a steering a single cell. GS Yubin Lin's lifeblood with J. Yodh on piano; Celeste R. and Paul K. Thread 1/N

Congrats, Daniel!

Epithelial tension controls intestinal cell extrusion Cell extrusion is essential for homeostatic self-renewal of the intestinal epithelium. Extrusion is thought to be triggered by crowding-induced compression of cells at the intestinal villus tip. In th...

Out in @science.org! We found that the intestine doesn’t just push out cells when crowded. Instead, cells are in a mechanical tug-of-war, and weaker ones are extruded. A new view of how our gut keeps its balance and stays healthy.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very excited to be co-organizing this meeting next February. Fellow collective behavior enthusiasts, this one is for you!

Check out those figure making skills! She should do Illustrator tutorials.

On kid number 3 (kid 1 born in my last year as a postdoc) and this has been my weekend schedule for the better part of a decade :)

Latest paper elifesciences.org/articles/107... closes an important cycle in our efforts to study regeneration: week-long recordings allow us to observe the behaviour of cells during the entire course of regeneration in a crustacean leg – bright objects in movie are fluorescent nuclei of cells. 1/6

🤩Wow huge opportunity alert!

And for your Friday afternoon, some in vivo ERK and RTK biosensor eye candy :)

NIH will only accept six applications per PI per calendar year. NIH has issued NOT-OD-25-132 Supporting Fairness and Originality in NIH Research Applications which informs us that NIH will only accept six new, renewal, resubmission, or revision applications fro…

NIH will only accept six applications per PI per calendar year. drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/07/17/n...

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

Two new preprints from the @arjunraj.bsky.social‬ on #gastruloids. Both excellent. Exploring the relationship between macroscopic reproducibility v microscopic heterogeneity. Stunning experiments and much to think about
biorxiv.org/content/earl...
biorxiv.org/content/earl...

Molecular recording of cellular protein kinase activity with chemical labeling - Nature Chemical Biology Molecular recorders based on kinase activity-dependent protein labeling track specific kinase activities to understand their link to cellular phenotypes in heterogeneous cell populations and in vivo.

Beautiful work on the development of protein kinase reporters. Congrats all! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We built pYtags to detect RTK activity in Drosophila embryos and used them to learn about how developmental patterns form bsky.app/profile/emko...

Excited to share that our work building in vivo biosensors for receptor tyrosine kinases (pYtags!) is now out www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Spatiotemporal orchestration of mitosis by cyclin-dependent kinase - Nature Experiments in fission yeast show that cyclin-dependent kinase is first activated in the nucleus, from which the mitotic signal is propagated from CDK at the centrosome to the cytoplasm.

Nature research paper: Spatiotemporal orchestration of mitosis by cyclin-dependent kinase

https://go.nature.com/444lRhe

Synthetic biology could enable new types of programmable therapeutics. Our new preprint introduces synthetic protein circuits that selectively trigger cell death in Ras-mutant cancer cells, with interesting advantages compared to existing approaches.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is incredible.

This is a beautiful paper first authored by a (brilliant) Princeton undergrad!

A screenshot of the termination notice showing "Outstanding Investigator Grants"

A screenshot of the termination notice with "This award is terminated effective the date of this award, due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students." highlighted

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

Opinion | Today’s Young People Need to Learn How to Be Punk

“Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems”

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/o...

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

I talked to Nature about the latest development at NSF, which is a five-alarm fire for American science. The scale of immediate impact is massive. We narrowly escaped this affecting @viralemergence.org for now, but will have to shut down in a few months if this stays.

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

There's lots more in the paper, but I just want to emphasize that an ideal switch:
- Should be easily adapted to respond to other kinases.
- Should easily "plug into" other target proteins.

Both are true! For example, here is a "phospho-nanobody" that binds actin only when ERK phosphorylates it :)

Here's where Qinhao rolled up his sleeves and got to work, testing dozens of variants and optimizing every component to build a better phospho-switch.

His final version basically looks as good as regular Gal4 when ERK is on, and has a 20x change in gene expression between ERK-on and off states!

So the idea:
- Take an opto-Gal4 transcription factor we previously made by inserting the AsLOV2 switch
- Swap out AsLOV2 for a FRET biosensor for our favorite kinase, ERK
- Check if ERK activity now controls Gal4-induced gene expression!

It worked, but honestly, not that well...

Qinhao had a stroke of insight: a classic kinase biosensor design (FRET biosensors) look just like an opto-switch! Both have N and C termini that are close together in one state and far apart in another. It is this change in N-to-C distance that "pulls" on the target protein to turn it on or off.