Alejandro Montenegro

"we developed Multiplexed Error Robust Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization 2.0 (MERFISH 2.0), an optimized spatial transcriptomic imaging chemistry to enhance profiling of fragmented and highly crosslinked RNA"

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Plant salt-tolerance mechanisms: Classic signaling pathways, emerging frontiers, and future perspectives This review synthesizes recent advances in the SOS signaling pathway, a central regulator of sodium homeostasis, and discusses the role of epigenetic regulation in salt adaptation and the integration ...

Plant salt-tolerance mechanisms: Classic signaling pathways, emerging frontiers, and future perspectives

www.cell.com/molecular-pl...

LOL, so their tagline was actually "We Want to Cheat on Everything"?! 😅

Cluely CEO Roy Lee admits to publicly lying about revenue numbers last year | TechCrunch The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely CEO Roy Lee shared last summer was a lie, its founder and CEO Roy Lee admitted on Thursday on X.

Let me guess. An AI company?

(*googles*) Yup, AI company.

techcrunch.com/2026/03/05/c...

“Hiring, promotion, and funding decisions often still revolve around traditional journal publications.”

www.science.org/content/arti...

I'm sure @pmelsted.bsky.social can comment on this :)

I'm sorry, 50 what now?

"We present a GPU implementation of kallisto for RNA-seq transcript quantification (...). For a large dataset of 295 million reads, runtime drops from 40 minutes to 50 seconds"

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud Mainstream chatbots presented varying levels of resistance to deliberate requests for fabrication, study finds.

Today, in news that shock nobody

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

I'll go to your lab if you'll have me 😊

Great Zoom meeting today with @bloodgenes.bsky.social.

We have some things cooking!

Yes, maybe, but it would not be about whether they have agreed or not to review before. Or it shouldn't 😅

Agreeing to review for a journal does not improve your chances of getting your own paper accepted there.

Further, recommending acceptance does not reduce your chances, as if a 'slot had been taken', and recommending rejection does not increase them, as if a 'slot had opened up'

This is all fine and good.

But please, sign your editorials.

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

#ThankYourEditor♥️

Native chromatome profiling reveals hundreds of metabolic enzymes in the nucleus across tissues - Nature Communications Here proteomic chromatome analysis shows metabolic enzymes widely localize to chromatin in cancer in a tissue-specific manner. Nuclear enzymes affect DNA damage/repair and transcription, revealing non...

New paper out in Nature Communications:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We found >250 metabolic enzymes on chromatin.
Only ~20 had been reported before.
This means hundreds of metabolic enzymes may have unexplored nuclear roles.

We do it because we care 😊

"Non-scientists with pet theories should ideally be directed away from arXiv"

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

bioRxiv: "Hypotheses without new data...are considered out of scope and will not be posted"

www.biorxiv.org/about/FAQ 1/n

👀

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.