asamelson

Thank you Alzforum for featuring our new preprint identifying regulators of disease states of #microglia.

Project led by Amanda McQuade, computation by Reet Mishra, collaboration with the Nunez and De Jager labs.

Alzforum
www.alzforum.org/news/researc...

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

MAHA action flyer for 10/1

The action hour agenda.

On Sept 17th, 2025, @aaas.org and @researchamerica.bsky.social hosted Jay Bhattacharya—NIH Director—as the keynote for the National Health Research Forum.

Less than two weeks later, he spoke at the MAHA Action hour alongside Oz, Russel Brand, Tony Lyons, and Callie Means.

I have a call to action:

Visualizing PINK1 Activity Dynamics in Single Cells with a Phase Separation-Based Kinase Activity Reporter Phosphatase and tensin homologue-induced kinase 1 (PINK1) is a serine/threonine kinase that plays roles in mitophagy, cell death, and regulation of cellular bioenergetics. Current approaches for study...

🎀 New from the lab 🎀 We used the SPARK design for kinase biosensors to develop a PINK1 biosensor, PINK1-SPARK. We used PINK1-SPARK to measure PINK1 activity in multiple cell types & when using HaloTag, for multiplexing! Plasmids coming soon, check out the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

L.A. No Kings March: next Sat. (10/18) at 2pm in DLTA!
L.A. Sign-making Party For No Kings: the night before! In West Adams! RSVP link below!
@50501-socal.bsky.social

www.mobilize.us/50501socal/e...

UCLA scientists use mini organ models to uncover secrets of deadly hantaviruses and point to new treatments UCLA researchers have created miniature stem cell-based organoid models of human lungs, hearts and brains to study how hantaviruses — rare but often deadly viruses spread by rodents — infect the body....

Researchers at UCLA built mini models of human lungs, hearts and brains to study hantaviruses and identify potential therapies. With no current treatments, these deadly rodent-borne viruses pose a serious threat to public health. #ResearchPowersProgress

stemcell.ucla.edu/news/ucla-sc...

Los Angeles rents are high, especially compared to the average pay - but it wasn't always that way.

In this video, LA Councilmember Nithya Raman goes over the history of why LA stopped building enough housing relative to the number of new jobs, and how the city can reverse that trend. 🏠🏠🏠

CRISPR screening by AAV episome-sequencing (CrAAVe-seq): a scalable cell-type-specific in vivo platform uncovers neuronal essential genes - Nature Neuroscience The authors developed an adeno-associated virus-based high-throughput in vivo CRISPR screening platform for endogenous mouse brain cell types. Using this platform, they define genes and pathways essen...

Excited that the paper presenting our mouse brain in vivo CRISPR screening platform is out today in @natneuro.nature.com!

Great team effort, led by Biswa Ramani and @ivlrose.bsky.social in the Kampmann lab.

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

2 bits of data from new Economist/YouGov poll.....

13% support for cutting research funding to universities. 24% among Republicans. Polling on this continues to be catastrophic for the Rs, suggests Dems should be learning far harder into standing up for science and our universities. 1/

California YIMBY Statement on LA City Council Vote on SB 79 Los Angeles, CA — Today the Los Angeles City Council voted to oppose SB 79, a state bill designed to expand affordable housing near major transit stops. In doing so, councilmembers repeated discredite...

“Los Angeles leaders are once again demonstrating their cowardice and failing their own constituents who desperately need more housing—and they’re doing it at the behest of LA’s wealthiest, most entitled voters, who have consistently blocked progress on housing affordability.” - @hanlon.bsky.social

UCLA scientists reprogram stem cells to create renewable cancer-fighting T cells In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, UCLA scientists have shown it’s possible to reprogram a patient’s blood-forming stem cells to generate a continuous supply of functional T cells, the immune syst...

In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, UCLA scientists have shown it’s possible to reprogram a patient’s own stem cells to create a continuous supply of functional T cells, the immune system’s most powerful cancer-killing agents. bit.ly/4fhvMnv

#CancerResearch #StemCellResearch

I'm thrilled to announce my next career step-- I’m joining Genentech as a Principal Scientist & Lab Head in Discovery Oncology!
I’ll be hunting new ways to target cancers using my background in disordered nuclear proteins.

the republican party is a modern day Slave Power and the only way forward for this country is to sweep it into the ash heap of history

UCLA-led team receives $3.5 million NIH grant to develop treatment for mpox: What to know about the viral illness Researchers from the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study and develop ...

UCLA-led team has received a $3.5 million grant from the NIH to study and develop treatments for the infectious disease #mpox. Their discoveries could help prevent the next global outbreak. ➡️ bit.ly/3TW38hI

These people, the gleeful goons, the giddy race scientists, the cheerleaders of misery, the “America for Americans only” demagogues—they don’t believe in this country. They never have, no matter how brazenly they’ll wrap themselves in the flag to justify their actions. The country they believe is small and cruel. It’s a country where secret police demand to see papers, where neighbors turn on neighbors, where the state is the enemy of the people rather than the embodiment of their collective will. It’s a place governed by fear and by hate, but even more so by doubt—doubt that any country could possibly be big enough to contain multitudes. Doubt that any country could be strong enough to take the unrealized dreams of the rest of the world and make them possible. Doubt that any country could be resilient enough to face hardship head-on and keep marching toward those ideals put to parchment by imperfect men two and a half centuries ago. They don’t believe in America, and no matter how tightly they grip the reins of government right now, America doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to the people who do believe in it, whether they came over on the Mayflower or through Ellis Island, in business class or on foot, “the right way” or not. Heck, maybe they were here long before anyone who looked like me showed up. It belongs to people who believe in those ideals that we’ve strove towards but never quite lived up to, people who believe that we should keep striving anyways because that arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself. It belongs to people willing to do the work, willing to stand up for their communities, and willing to take to their streets to stand up for those unmet ideals. It belongs to people who can still see the promise of this place in their mind and want more than anything to be a part of it, even if they have to cross an ocean or a desert to do so.

Logging off for the weekend, but shouting it one more time before I do: they don't believe in America.

actioncookbook.substack.com/p/america-be...

Once again, this is a massive public jobs program for fascists.

This bill was never just about tax cuts and gutting social services. It's about investing our collective resources in violence and using state power to spread fear and destroy solidarity. We need to resist this with all we've got.

I am grieving the barbarism that is going to unfurl from all this. People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy.

I see every day up close how different it is from the first time around. There are no guardrails. A disaster. I’m sorry we have to live through this.

Legitimately feel sick. We are hours away from the largest cuts to low-income people in history. People’s lives will be ruined. It is so unfair. It’s unfair to be born into a system that allows this level of poverty in the first place and it’s evil to rip away aid from the needy. Hard to watch this.

genuinely, kicking 17 MILLION people off of their health insurance and stripping TWO MILLON people off of food assistance is so grotesque and depressing it’s hard to think of anything else

GOP reconciliation bill's effects:

—Poorest 1/5 of earners: *declining* after-tax incomes
—Those making >$3 m/year gain $118,000
—12 m people become uninsured
—3.2 m people lose food stamps
—US stops its efforts to combat climate change
—$122 billion spent on deportation & concentration camps

Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Basically the @elife.bsky.social model?

Save Medicaid NOW - Final Push Phonebanks to Republican Congressmembers · Mobilize The Republican controlled Congress and Senate are voting on budgets that will decimate Medicaid and millions of Californians will lose their healthcare - just so they can give more tax breaks to their...

Final Senate votes in next 36 hours.

www.mobilize.us/mobilize/eve... Save Medicaid NOW - Final Push Phonebanks to Republican Congressmembers · Mobilize

Protein Dynamics at Different Timescales Unlock Access to Hidden Post-Translational Modification Sites Post-translational modifications (PTMs) alter the proteome in response to intra- and extracellular signals, providing fundamental information processing in development, homeostasis and disease. Here, ...

New preprint with Benjamin Lang, Richard Kriwacki, John Christodoulou, and M. Madan Babu!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Protein Dynamics at Different Timescales Unlock Access to Hidden Post-Translational Modification Sites
#bioinformatics #compchem #folding #proteindynamics

Elites aren't even using their existing mechanisms set up to allow deniable messaging. Go look at PhRMA, the big bad lobbying group; they've got nothing to say about their NIH R&D pipeline being destroyed, nor about the worst regression in public health and vaccine acceptance in U.S. history.

We're so close to fixing key drivers of California's housing crisis:
✅️ SB 79 would legalize apartments near transit.
✅️ AB 130 would end frivolous litigation against infill.
✅️ AB 253 + AB 1308 would prevent permitting/inspection delays.
➡️ Here's how you can help.

For Alzheimer's & Brain Awareness Month, we highlight the work of Dr. Jessica Rexach, a UCLA neurologist and neurogeneticist working to uncover the molecular drivers of Alzheimer’s disease. Learn more about her work: stemcell.ucla.edu/member-direc...

#StemCellResearch #Neuroscience #BrainHealth

Text in link

A big thanks to NC Rep. Valerie Foushee for being the first signature on this bipartisan letter urging the House to maintain a strong commitment to funding for NIH in the 2026 Appropriations bill. Is your Representative here?
www.aamc.org/research/adh...

Check out Laura's thread on our latest preprint demonstrating best methods for low biomass skin sampling.

Interested in supporting the brave NIHers mentioned in RFK jr.’s hearing today?

Join 29k of us - Nobel Laureates, NIHers, doctors, scientists & concerned citizens- in signing our letter of support:
act.standupforscience.net/forms/add-na...

#StandUpForScience
#BethesdaDeclaration
#SaveNIH
#RFKjr

🧵Excited to share our new preprint introducing iHOTT - an autologous tumor-immune co-culture model that captures patient-specific responses in #Glioblastoma

💥Now on
@biorxivpreprint
: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Led by Dr. Shivani Baisiwala, Neurosurgery Resident in the lab