Alejandro Montenegro

Congrats, this is great. Maybe you can join us next year at @molbiosystems.bsky.social to tell us more about your work 😊

Seven wonders of RNA modification biology This Perspective discusses seven frontiers in RNA modification research. The examples cited highlight technological advances, regulatory principles both unique and broad-spanning, and questions about how biological information is ...

This piece discusses seven frontiers in RNA modification research. The examples cited highlight technological advances, regulatory principles both unique & broad-spanning, & questions about how biological information is post-transcriptionally encoded in chemical marks comprising just a few atoms.

High-frequency biparental inheritance of plant mitochondria upon chilling stress and loss of a genome-degrading nuclease - Nature Plants Maternal inheritance of mitochondria breaks down in the cold when a mitochondrial DNA degrading nuclease is defective, resulting in biparental inheritance that can rescue mitochondrial mutations and g...

"Here, we have established a robust genetic screen to detect paternal mitochondrial inheritance in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum)"

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

👀

Guest Post — The Value Challenge in Scholarly Publishing - The Scholarly Kitchen Today's guest blogger identifies signals of how fractured the scholarly research ecosystem has become, and how the value publishers provide is increasingly questioned, dismissed, or overlooked by key ...

"Equally important is sustained & inclusive dialogue among all stakeholders in the research ecosystem, including publishers, researchers, funders, institutions, & scholarly societies. The challenges facing scholarly publishing are systemic & cannot be addressed through isolated or unilateral action"

Yup. If people don't read what they cite (and many don't), or only access papers via LLMs (which many do, and that number will continue to grow), they may not be aware (or care) that a paper has been retracted, and will continue to cite it as if nothing has happened.

Which is terrible.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

And there's also this

bsky.app/profile/mkru...

A symbiotic origin of the ribosome? Abstract. The origin of life is one of the great mysteries of science. Of the multiple unsolved problems, the origin of the translation system (the means b

Interesting, and this also just came out

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Fungal genome sequencing for free! 👇🏼 #GGFungi2026

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Fred Hutch is dedicated to the elimination of cancer and related diseases as causes of human suffering and death.

My awesome colleague, @yarimura.bsky.social, is recruiting a postdoc to start at the end of 2026 or early 2027! His lab uses cryo-EM to uncover structural basis of key chromatin events using native complexes isolated from human cells or Xenopus egg extracts!

careers-fhcrc.icims.com/jobs/30706/p...

It seems like nowadays, with AI, I'm increasingly waking up to read about people coming up with solutions for problems that do not exist.

A symbiotic origin of the ribosome? Abstract. The origin of life is one of the great mysteries of science. Of the multiple unsolved problems, the origin of the translation system (the means b

"we propose that the protoribosome was a parasite (...). If this view is correct, then like the spliceosome in the stem eukaryote, a repurposed host-parasite interaction led to a dramatic change in cell biology at the base of the tree of life, in this case leading to the exit from an RNA world"

📷Cover image info: cshprotocols.cshlp.org/content/2026...

📒Full issue: cshprotocols.cshlp.org/content/2026...

A new issue of CSH Protocols is out!
@cshlpress.bsky.social

The cover image highlights the work by Moss et al., who describe how to use fluorescence flow cytometry and specific AuxInYeast strains to study #maize auxin perception.

⬇️Links below

"Here, we present SPAtial Cell Exploration (SPACE), a spatial CRISPR screening platform that integrates whole-transcriptome profiling (~18,000 genes), multiplexed protein detection (~68 markers), and CRISPR perturbation mapping at subcellular resolution"

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

Ah, good for you!

bsky.app/profile/aemo...

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

The quoted preprint at the start of the thread is now out

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Yup, a key aspect of my proposal is trust, which directs also which journals can be part of the suite

Hahahhaha

Please read the proposal 😊

Curation for significance comes after the paper is deemed sound.

If you think that curve is absolutely required for the paper to be sound, you ask for it. That's it. It's up to the editors of the journals in the suite if they need it or not to extend an invitation after the paper is deemed sound. We can discuss offline 😅

Alternatively, all of the journals in the suite (particularly if grouped by subject area), could have a shared set of standards, to avoid that. It really depends on what journals are part of the suite.

Right. And in that specific scenario, that would then mean that that specific journal would not invite the authors, and the paper would then be published in one of the other journals in the suite

Only soundness.

Maybe it can be expanded to allow the inviting journals to *only* ask for stylistic changes but no more experiments/analyses, as the paper has already been found to be sound. And the authors can decide to do that or not.

While true, that's a decision for the editors, not the reviewers.

Also, that's a factor that would come into play when deciding which journals would be part of that specific group. But point taken!

Mine is different, but i too have heard very mixed feelings

One suggestion to avoid multiple rounds of re-review at different journals: review things only at one place. And then, different journals can offer to take the paper if they want it.

That's part of my bottoms-up approach to publishing (first posted back in 2018):
aemonten.github.io/posts/2018/0...