John Janetzko

Thanking the reviewers

A lab that collects data together stays together. Feeling like the luckiest PI to work with such great folks 🤩🔬 @cuanschutz.bsky.social @cu-bmg.bsky.social

Welcome New Members graphic. Nicole Kaiser, PharmD, Vicki Catenacci, MD, Mohammad Bilal, MD, John Janetzko, PhD, Wyatt Shields, PhD, Christine Conageski, MD, Ally Nguyen, PhD, Matthew Witkowski, PhD, Peter Fecci, MD, PhD, Stephanie McGrath, DVM, Glen Peterson, DNP, Brenna McGinn, PhD, MSM.

We have new members! Welcome to the CU Cancer Center! 👏

The acknowledgements section speaks to considerable privilege. Without a senior author, he and his classmate were provided with lab space, purified protein, and technical help. Their paper was communicated to PNAS. I doubt many undergraduate researchers have received comparable support.

31/n

So you’re saying there’s a chance

Tbf lottery still has to be lower chance, but point is very well taken

With news that NIH grant success rates are now below 5%, consider the effort that goes into one of these grants (apart from you, who submitted 60 AI-written grants)- why would you put in that much effort knowing your chances are only slightly better than winning a lottery? 1/

No better time to call or email your members of Congress. Next year’s NIH budget is being debated in the Senate. A new nonpartisan campaign is making it easy to defend science and protect America’s innovation. Just follow this link to contact your representatives: www.protectscienceandinnovation.org

We are going to hear a lot in the near future about how University brass “has to make hard decisions”. Twill be interesting to see who those hard decisions land upon.

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

A short Bluetorial about my early days as the Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at NIH.

The importance of feeling responsibility and taking pride in doing the best job you can

Oh no. This is insanity! Hopefully if we do twist the pretzel in 2026 it gets untwisted again in 2028.

Systematic identification and characterization of eukaryotic and viral 2A peptide-bond-skipping sequences Rao et al. identified thousands of previously unknown 2A peptides across both viruses and eukaryotes using an HMMER analysis. The authors further identified a unique class of 2A peptides, class B, who...

Excited to see this collaborative work with Olivia Rissland's lab finally out. We found lots of 2A peptides and an entirely new 2A class.

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

The world is in chaos, but we still need to rally with our people!

Janetzko-Bell lab and friends happy hour to celebrate grant submissions, new additions and scientific accomplishments 🎉

@cu-bmg.bsky.social

In America, we have no kings.

🥴

Membrane phosphoinositides allosterically tune β-arrestin dynamics to facilitate GPCR core engagement Arrestin proteins bind active G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) through coordinated protein-protein, protein-phosphate, and protein-lipid interactions to attenuate G protein signaling and promote GP...

Setting up a lab has been no joke. Today, I'm stoked to have one more piece of my postdoc work out in the wild.
Several more manuscripts to go, and I don't have a lot of time for a blue-torial(?) today, but enjoy and happy to get any feedback on this story.

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

Sometimes this job can feel like a lot. But sometimes it’s the best job you could imagine. Your whole lab tells you they want to come in on Saturday to finish an experiment we’ve worked up to and you get to see the look of amazement on your tech’s face when her first negative stain works 😍

Fml

Federal funding to Harvard is primarily for basic research labs, a government-university partnership that has been US policy for 80 years since the end of WWII. International undergraduate student tuition is not federally funded. Anyone trying to confuse these two things is trying to play you.

So: In 2017, Congress made this happen:

NIH: Proposed 22% cut --> 9% increase
NSF: Proposed 11% cut --> 4% increase
NOAA: Proposed 16% cut --> 4% increase

Obviously, 2025 is not 2017. A lot is diff now. But still:

💰 Congress, not WH, sets budgets.

📞 Public support & calls to Congress matter.

Is there a way to read the whole article?

[Person with ponytail wearing lab coat hands balloon to another person in front of a springboard, a magnet hanging from above, and then a target] PERSON WITH PONYTAIL to Person 2: Rub this balloon against your head, then go jump past that magnet toward the target on the wall. [caption] Before the bathroom scale was invented, the only way to weigh people was mass spectrometry.

Mass Spec

xkcd.com/3094/

NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.

Oh FFS! This government is self sabotaging the decades long edge America had in recruiting the most talented people from across the world.

Idk about talented but I was on OPT after my PhD

Well, this didn’t age well 👀

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.”
A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world.
www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...

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I heard rumors starting yesterday that this same stunt was at least being contemplated with PubMed!

This would be very harmful to researchers, but also to patients and the public as they rely of PubMed for access to health information.

Doctors also depend on PubMed, often in real time.

A lot of the things you just talked about in the outside, in the scientific community, I think part of it stems from the fact that so much of the scientific community is on the left and they didn’t vote for President Trump. And so almost any change made is going to end up causing, you know, anxiety.

NIH slashes overheads, fires directors and staff, freezes funds, halts trials, interrupts research, stalls grant review, and terminates 100s of grants on infectious disease, vaccines, mRNA, DEI, LGBTQ health.

NIH director, to Bari Weiss: Scientists are just upset because they didn't vote for Trump.