The brain fires up immune cells when sick people are nearby When people viewed virtual avatars with coughs or rashes, their brains triggered an immune response.

thought is a miracle
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Cells That Breathe Two Ways | Quanta Magazine In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

Bacteria from a Yellowstone hot spring do something no other organism has been found to do: breathe oxygen and sulfur at the same time. 🧪 It's both aerobic and anaerobic, a beautiful freaky creature from a beautiful freaky place

🐌💫 Snail embryos never looked so fabulous!
Tubulin (white), phospho-histone H3 (pink), and F-Actin (cyan) light up this early stage like a cytoskeletal disco ball.
Image from Clemens Cabernard & Adam von Barnau Sythoff 🪩🧬 #FluorescenceFriday

whole genome doubling is common in cancers, below you can see how that manifests in single cell transcriptomics (of ovarian cancer)

slides for those interested: www.auai.org/uai2025/tuto...

Aceitón, Riobó, Del Valle Batalla, Yuseff et al show that B cells respond to mechanical cues at the immune synapse through ATAT1-dependent microtubule acetylation to coordinate cytoskeletal dynamics & lysosome positioning, enhancing antigen extraction and presentation rupress.org/jcb/article/...

Microtubules: the architect of muscles. Watch how microtubules transport mitochondria in proximity to energy consuming sarcomeres in muscles of flies and mice. @jeromeavellaneda.bsky.social @nunoluis.bsky.social @ibdm.bsky.social with @gomeslabo.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

using interpretability methods to extract biological hypotheses hidden in the model and then validating the most promising ones in the wet lab. some datasets are strong enough to establish the existence of a mechanism, but observing the mechanism in action will ultimately be needed to settle debates

where the authors examine the model gradients (cf. "Identifying important regions and regulators" to guess which TF motifs interact with genes. From Fig1 of the paper, it's clear the model is inacurrate in many scenarios, and accurate in just as many. but they found a new biological fact from it

(stops *at benchmarks) ... rarely applies interpretability to extract possible mechanisms (causal relationships), ie biological truths, that the model has learned to work in certain contexts. a good example of this interpretability is (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

"causal" has several technical definitions, eg referenced authors' vs your own, and considering only one to be a appropriate works for debating, but ignores other fields of study. however, this thread made me realize that ML culture stops and benchmarks, and rarely applies interpretability

chopper meme <3

Have you ever thought about inflating tissues?
Or maybe quickly deflating those inflated tissues?

New #EpithelialMechanics pre-print: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
🧵 with pressure control, multiscale buckling, controlled wrinkling

what a time to be alive! (you know, as far image processing is concerned)

sorry, thanks for correcting. causal methods do exist for deconfounding of observational data (eg propensity matchng), but agree that interventions (eg crispr screens) are preferable, best is RNA + ATAC (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) tho can RNA also b informative (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

dogma now absurd first

I am once again reminded of my favorite @edyong209.bsky.social quote:

“…a tiny wise decision can do exponential good.”

disagree that trans reg. models always end up just doing weighted nearest neighbors & they do not learn biology, but agree current cis models generalize better. perturbation data is not sequences but still is biology. for me GRN models a "virtual cell" more directly than sequence (my bias). 💯thead

Always ‘one atom away’: The long, rocky journey to an HIV prevention breakthrough Developing lenacapavir, the drug newly approved to protect against HIV for six months in one shot, took basic science, sophisticated chemistry, and perseverance

Developing lenacapavir, the drug newly approved to protect against HIV for six months in one shot, took basic science, sophisticated chemistry, and perseverance
www.science.org/cont...

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it.
1/3

nerve cells give their mitochondria to cancer cells. yeah, really.

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

🤯

Promotional image for the "Single-Cell Approaches in Plant Biology GRC Conference" focusing on meeting the speakers. This promo includes an image of Dr. Rachel Shahan from UCLA with a short bio on Dr. Shahan.

Meet The Speakers of the Single-Cell Approaches in Plant Biology GRC Conference!

To Apply to the GRC: lnkd.in/gvkMxuKR

To Learn More About Dr. Shahan's Research: sites.lifesci.ucla.edu/mcdb-shahan/

@rachelmshahan.bsky.social

If we can develop cheap, effective and stable inoculants... Effect of Arbuscular Mycorrhyzal Fungi in Improving Soybean Growth in Ultisol Soil | Applied Research in Science and Technology

authors say bc genetic perturbation had smaller dataset:
"performance gains over mean baselines were notably larger on Tahoe-100Million[...] and Parse-PBMC, which includes 10 million [...], as compared to [...] genetic perturbation datasets conducted in just a few cell lines." about 3 million cells

If we trust genetic engineering to save a child from leukemia, why reject it when it could save a child from blindness, malnutrition, or death?

We cure cancer with genetic engineering but ban it on the farm.

Celebrating one but demonizing the other fuels disinformation that costs lives.

1/

I've seen this disease firsthand; believe me when I say this is an incredibly important moment for those who have EB. Bravo Stanford!

"cells grow long signaling filopodia called cytonemes [...] visible extending from the orange cell"

Explore Wikipedia through a data map. Pages are grouped by semantic similarity, for topic clusters.
Hover to see details, zoom to explore more fine-grained topics, click to go to a page. Search by page
name to find interesting starting points for exploration.

lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_...

I heartily agree with educating the public and being transparent about the reasoning behind policies. However, I also think people need actionable messages. Even if one understands "risk", it takes a lot of work and expertise to know how to apply that concept to your life and current situation.