David L. Stern

Tiny brains. Big ideas. 🐝

Join us April 15 for #BIGIDEAS: The Minds of Insects at the Institute—an evening exploring how insects think, learn, and shape the world around us with @larschittka.bsky.social and @gallseeker.bsky.social.

🎟️ Registration is now open: bit.ly/4aFHJ5A

Remember her name: Aliya Rahman

Her testimony is everything and it deserves to be heard, by everyone. Decide for yourself.

It’s powerful. It’s gut-wrenching. And no one should have to survive what she did.

ICE MUST GO‼️

The invasive soybean pest Helicoverpa armigera has acquired resistance to Bt toxins from native H. zea in Brazil. We showing this in a time series of genome data from nearly 1000 individuals over 10 years, plus a lab strain experiment that verified the function

The collision of two genomes threatens global food security Human activity alters selection pressures and species' ranges, creating opportunities for hybridisation through secondary contact. Ancient hybridization has enabled adaptive radiation, but its role in...

Excited about our new preprint showing bidirectional adaptive introgression between invasive and native crop pests over ecological timescales www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fantastic!

How has this pun never occurred to me?

Watch the video.
Classroom learning has approximately nothing to do with being a scientist.
I fondly recall John sitting in the front row of seminars, shielding his eyes from the Powerpoint garbage so that he could listen intently to the spoken words. A true inspiration.

YouTube video by Zohran Mamdani for NYC Until It's Done: Sylvia Rivera

Mamdani talking lucidly and passionately about trans rights and history in a video that should frankly shame every politician who has hemmed and hawed and triangulated and said, "Well, but sports..." It's not that hard to tell the truth and stand for what's right. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEvV...

Why would a healthy cell decide to die? Investigator Randal Halfmann joined @npr.org's "All Things Considered" to discuss his #research on how and why cells decide to self-destruct—a process known as programmed cell death. #SciSky

🎧 Listen here: n.pr/3L4i1gF

A Song of Ice and Fire | Eric Kurlander World Ice Theory and the supernatural imaginary of the Third Reich.

In the history of authoritarian regimes promoting pseudoscience for ideological reasons, one that I just learned about: "World Ice Theory" and the Nazis.

www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/s...

John Gurdon (1933 – 2025) - MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Renowned developmental biologist John Gurdon, former Group Leader and Head of the LMB’s Cell Biology Division, has died aged 92.

Very sad to learn of the death of Sir John Gurdon. He made a huge contribution to developmental biology & should be an inspiration to anyone whose potential is dismissed in school. It was a pleasure to work with him when he was Chair of the COB Board. www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/john-gurdon-...

Figure from the preprint showing sensory neuron morphology with different levels of Cas9 expression.

High levels of Cas9 are toxic in sensory neurons. Reducing Cas9 levels with uORFs avoids toxicity and is compatible with efficient editing. From @thompsonpeerlab.bsky.social. Fly lines @vdrc-flies.bsky.social

#CRISPR #Drosophila

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

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

FlyBase Update – October 2025 The termination of the NIH/NHGRI FlyBase grant has placed the long-term sustainability of FlyBase at risk. However, thanks to the generous support of several key individuals and institutions, we are pleased to announce that FlyBase will remain operational through the coming year. We extend our deepest gratitude to Yukiko Yamashita, Cassandra Extavour, Hugo Bellen, Thom Kaufman, the Genetics Society of America / Drosophila Board, the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, an anonymous donor and the Wellcome Trust. We are especially thankful for a generous gift from Seemay Chou, Jed McCaleb, and The Navigation Fund. We also greatly appreciate the continued support from the broader Drosophila community – your donations and service fees have been vital in helping us stay afloat. Special thanks also go to Jessica Manning for her tireless administrative work at Harvard, to Ruth Lehmann, Hugo Bellen, and Paul Sternberg for advice and efforts, and to the Board of the European Drosophila Society for all their efforts. Sadly, we must also share that several long-standing FlyBase team members have recently moved on. We are immensely grateful to Susan Russo-Gelbart, Lynn Crosby, Gil dos Santos, Kris Broll, Victoria Jenkins, and TyAnna Lovato for their many years of dedicated service and contributions to FlyBase. Looking ahead, ensuring FlyBase’s sustainability beyond the next year – and successfully integrating with the Alliance – will require new funding sources. We kindly ask for your continued support: • European labs: Please consider contributing to the Cambridge, U.K. FlyBase group • U.S. and other non-European labs: Please consider contributing to the U.S. FlyBase groups • Both U.K. and U.S. FlyBase are working diligently to establish an invoicing system. We appreciate your continued patience. For more information on how to support us, please visit: Contribute to FlyBase wiki page https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase

There's an update on the state of FlyBase on the FlyBase.org front page. You can contribute to FlyBase at this link wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...
We express enormous gratitude to the people, labs, groups, and foundations who have already helped us.
#FlyBase #Drosophila

Agrawal lab logo. A fly in the UBC colors, with dots framing its body.

The Agrawal lab is moving! This January we will be setting up shop at #UBC in Vancouver, in the department of #Zoology! We are actively recruiting at all levels, especially masters and PhD students. These position are #funded! Please send anyone interested my way!

Haha. Part of the lab will be working to shorten their lives. But, yeah!

Thanks Arnaud. Sorry to be leaving the DMV, but onward, upward, and westward.

Thanks Fillip!

Thanks James. Much closer to Utah...

Thanks Alicia! Very exciting opportunity!

(Part 1) Hear from @hhmi_news Investigator David Stern about his research program and what he's uncovering in the lab.

Stern will join the Institute in February 2026, bringing his lab and HHMI appointment to Kansas City. @hhmi.org

Read more: bit.ly/4np96Fb

(Part 2)

“From my first visit, I was struck by the energy and excitement...It feels like being a graduate student again, chasing curiosity wherever it leads."

@hhmi.org Investigator David Stern will join the Stowers Institute in Feb. 2026 from @hhmijanelia.bsky.social.

Read more: bit.ly/4np96Fb

It's official! We are moving to Stowers!
Very exciting opportunity to expand our studies of insect-plant interactions. We have many opportunities available in biochemistry, development, behavior, genetics, evolution, genomics, AI, and even pest control. Interested in any of these things? Reach out!

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

The final version of our paper on how ants and possibly other insects use a crazy mechanism involving extensive transcriptional interference to regulate odorant receptor expression is now open access in my favorite journal, @currentbiology.bsky.social

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Local translation of circular RNAs is required for synaptic activity and memory Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are enriched in synapses and implicated in cognitive processes, and recent studies have shown that circRNAs can encode micropeptides, which suggests that there may be novel sy...

How do neurons deal with fitting large regulatory proteins into small spaces to control plasticity and memory? By generating micropeptides via local translation of circRNAs, of course! Here’s to shedding new light on the ‘dark’ proteome in the brain.

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

GPU-accelerated homology search with MMseqs2 - Nature Methods Graphics processing unit-accelerated MMseqs2 offers tremendous speedups for homology retrieval from metagenomic databases, query-centered multiple sequence alignment generation for structure predictio...

GPU-accelerated MMseqs2 offers tremendous speedup for homology retrieval, protein structure prediction with ColabFold, and protein structure search with Foldseek. @martinsteinegger.bsky.social @milot.bsky.social @machine.learning.bio

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

#PhD applications are NOW OPEN! Hear from an alum⬇️

Kristallnacht Started When This Diplomat Was Murdered in Cold Blood | HISTORY Ernst vom Rath’s murder triggered a two-day pogrom against German Jews.

Recalling this bit of history — When the shooting of a German diplomat in 1938 was used by the Nazis as a pretext for Kristallnacht.

Individual violence doesn’t justify state bigotry and oppression, ever.

www.history.com/articles/kri...

Looking for a PhD? I am advertising two industry sponsored PhD projects. One on black soldier fly genetics with #betabugs and another on searching insect biodiversity for novel enzymes #Syngenta. Get in touch if you are interested!! bbsrcdtp.lifesci.cam.ac.uk/available-ic...