Alex Donovan

Computational design of sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Published online: 12 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41594-025-01669-4The authors develop a computational method to design small DNA-binding proteins (DBPs) that target specific sequences. Designed DBPs show structural accuracy and function in both bacterial and mammalian cells for transcriptional regulation.

New online: Computational design of sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins

A host organelle integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis Sea slugs steal foreign chloroplasts and store them in specialized organelles that facilitate photosynthesis and eventual digestion to mediate starvation resistance.

Very cool paper providing mechanism to how sea slugs can retain photosynthetically active chloroplasts (also love the term kleptosomes) - www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Congratulations!! 🎉

A map of flight paths emanating from breeding colony of gulls, with this caption: Early on, LifeWatch noticed something odd. Most gulls were making daily trips to Mouscron, a city on the French border 65 km away. They went to investigate and found the birds bingeing on discarded snacks at the Roger & Roger potato factory.

Today in relatable science: Gulls making a mysterious daily trip that turned out to be to a potato chip factory

My Cyclops (type of freshwater copepod) culture is teeming with life 🧫

Extreme close up of red eyed tree frog eyelids

Is there anything more unsettling and beautiful than the eyelids of a red eyed tree frog? They're so ornate and bizarre. I can't think of anything else like them.

More pictures of different examples -

Looking at some water from an algal culture for fun and came across these bizarre creatures, does anyone know what they might be? This looks like it might be part of their development where they initially emerge within this hairy chamber then hatch as they grow (?) more pics to follow 🧫

If you are interested in neural stem cells, epigenetics or both (or neither honestly) you should read Anna’s preprint! Beautiful work characterising histone modification dynamics across neural stem cell quiescence and reactivation, in truly excruciating detail and at great breadth 🤯🪰🧬

Super cool work! Congratulations Leo! 🍾🎉

Chromatin loops are an ancestral hallmark of the animal regulatory genome - Nature The physical organization of the genome in non-bilaterian animals and their closest unicellular relatives is characterized; comparative analysis shows chromatin looping is a conserved feature of ...

I’m very excited to share our work on the early evolution of animal regulatory genome architecture - the main project of my postdoc, carried out across two wonderful and inspirational labs of @arnausebe.bsky.social and @mamartirenom.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Complete sequencing of ape genomes - Nature Complete sequences of chromosomes telomere-to-telomere from chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan and siamang provide a comprehensive and valuable resource for future evol...

New telomere to telomere ape genomes - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants Studies that touch on LGBT+ health, gender identity and DEI in the biomedical workforce could be terminated, according to documents obtained by Nature.

In an unprecedented move, the US National Institutes of Health has begun mass terminations of research grants that fund active scientific projects because they no longer meet “agency priorities”.


https://go.nature.com/4bpG2It

Can’t say that Gilead sciences sponsoring drag race was on my bingo card 😂

Congratulations Lakshmi!! 🥳

I have read few papers as immediately useful and important as this one on Cacio e Pepe phase behavior.

Tl;dr: the starchy pasta water is absolutely critical to avoiding “mozzarella phase”

arxiv.org/abs/2501.00536

Looks amazing! Congrats Feline 😊

Calcium dynamics tune developmental tempo to generate evolutionarily divergent axon tract lengths The considerably slow pace of human brain development correlates with an evolutionary increase in brain size, cell numbers, and expansion of neuronal structures, with axon tracts undergoing an even gr...

Why is human brain development, and particularly neuron morphogenesis, so slow and how is this linked to evolution? doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.28.630576
We developed mouse brain organoid methods capturing differences to human and used these to address this. doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.21.629881
🧵 (1/n)

40 years ago all of Genbank was published in print form by NAR. The same format today would require over 4 light seconds of shelf space. To a year of progress in 2025.

How proximal is proximity labeling❓ Using DNA nanorulers we found that TurboID/BioID are largely contact labeling, while APEX2 also bears a major contact labeling pathway in parallel with diffusive labeling.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Special thanks to @aliceyting.bsky.social for discussions

A nice (and very random) gift from my local coffee place, Hot Numbers! 🥳

1/🚀 Excited to share RegVelo, our new cell model combining RNA velocity with gene regulatory network (GRN) dynamics to model cellular changes and predict in silico perturbations. Here's how it works and why it matters! 🧵👇
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.11.627935v1

Definitely! Hope everything has been going well 😁

Wastes of time — faeces and vomit track how dinosaurs rose to prominence Fossil evidence of feeding activity used to reconstruct food webs.

I greatly appreciate this title.

They propose eliminating... the entire NIH...

A microRNA is the effector gene of a classic evolutionary hotspot locus In Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), the genomic region around the gene cortex is a “hotspot” locus, repeatedly implicated in generating intraspecific melanic wing color polymorphisms across 100 mi...

This is such a cool example (and one of the most convincing I've seen) of non-coding RNAs having powerful and direct control over phenotype (melanization)! 🦋

📌

The story of genomics. A tale of advancing healthcare.

When we understand the story of #genomics, we can understand diseases better. This means we can diagnose them quicker, treat them more effectively, and even prevent them.

Welcome to the #devbiolwriteclub Bluesky Boot Camp! I’ll be posting here regularly with thoughts and exercises to help scientists become better writers. Let’s start by managing expectations: I will NOT help you write better. I WILL help you become a better writer. 🧵 1/10

I think @novogene-europe.bsky.social might have won the company swag race with this one… (more important than the great RNA-seq data I got from them)