Kaia Mattioli

very happy to hear that the Senate is supportive of life-saving scientific research in America; let's keep making sure that the taxpayers understand how important the NIH is for understanding, preventing, and curing diseases like cancer that don't discriminate across party lines.

Full Committee Markup of Defense and Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Acts | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

🧪 Senate appropriators say: NIH's budget gets a... boost!

Rather than 40% cut, NIH gets a $400M *increase* in the Senate committee bill for FY26 (about +1%).

"Congress has your back," said @murray.senate.gov.

ADVOCACY MATTERS! There's still a long road (esp in the House), so keep up pressure.

Extra kudos and thanks to all the staff at NIH and NSF and other federal funding agencies for working extra hard in very small windows of opportunity to get grants reviewed and funds released before the attention-addled federal policies change again (on an hourly basis).

uhhhhhhhh

Cas13d-mediated isoform-specific RNA knockdown with a unified computational and experimental toolbox - Nature Communications The majority of human genes can produce multiple isoforms, but studying their functional relevance requires tools to target specific isoforms. Here, the authors develop a CRISPR-based exon-exon juncti...

Excited for this to be out officially! It was a great team effort and has a lot of useful tidbits for studying isoform function. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

we are ok so far!! making it work by moving tanks back and forth. but good tip re middlesex

heh

very high stakes today in the lab (floor is down to one tank of LN2 and deliveries are delayed due to a driver's strike) loyalties are being tested... alarms are being silenced... temperatures are being monitored.... drama is ensuing

American profs, be honest: what are the vibes in your departments in terms of new faculty searches? do you think you will have open searches next cycle? there's a lot of talk about the terrible job market amongst senior postdocs, but I haven't heard much from profs

“With these considerations, we expect to fund through the 4th percentile.”

There it is, in black and white, the destruction of cancer research in the US.

... all in all it definitely helped (sped up what I would otherwise be Google Scholar-ing, let's say) but don't think it revolutionized the process that much. it's much more helpful for coding + answering specific questions + brainstorming ideas than it is for writing imo.

... so I had to do a ton of prompting to get it to understand the point I was trying to make. that being said, it was pretty useful when I needed suggestions for transitions AND it was super useful for literature searches and fact checking (with me double checking obviously) ...

been thinking about this -- I just submitted a review, which just so happens to be the only big writing project I've worked on in a post-LLM society. I thought the LLM would help me with writing more than it actually did; imo it wasn't that good at connecting high level ideas ...

unreasonably sad that Aliquots, our building cafe with an incredible name and decent donuts, closed for good unceremoniously 😭 it's been a reliable snack source for me for 11 years and it's just.... boarded up!!

getting weirder and weirder to show up at work every day as a researcher at a university and pretend we're not witnessing the active dismantling of American research universities

Grant terminations have grabbed the headlines and have seen legal action, but even more damaging to the US research enterprise has been the massive decrease in number of research grants issued by federal agencies

NIH has seen a decrease of 57% in the number of awards & 63% in value compared to FY24

a close up of a circular object with a reflection of a wave ALT: a close up of a circular object with a reflection of a wave

live footage of my toddler realizing he can open doors

tell me you're writing a review without telling me you're writing a review

Retrospective and multifactorial single-cell profiling reveals sequential chromatin reorganization during X inactivation - Nature Cell Biology Kefalopoulou, Rullens et al. develop Dam&ChIC to assay chromatin state at two different time points in the same cell. The method was used to study the reorganization of LADs during cell division a...

I am very excited to share our latest work where we describe a new method to profile genome-wide chromatin transitions over time in single cells. Great collaborative effort with the van Oudenaarden group @hubrechtinstitute.bsky.social @oncodeinstitute.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41....

I thought LLM-speak was getting bad on here & then I logged on to LinkedIn 🫠🥴

or should I say

I was getting tired of reading this cadence. I thought it was insufferable on Bluesky and X—then I opened LinkedIn. That's when it hit me: it's worse there.

Enhancer adoption by an LTR retrotransposon generates viral-like particles, causing developmental limb phenotypes - Nature Genetics Activation of an LTR retrotransposon inserted upstream of the Fgf8 gene produces viral-like particles in the mouse developing limb, triggering apoptosis and causing limb malformation. This phenotype c...

Finally out! 🥳 Our paper showing how a transposable element (TE) insertion can cause developmental phenotypes is now published @natgenet.nature.com 🧬🦠🐁
Below is a brief description of the major findings. Check the full version of the paper for more details: www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02248-5

I'm grateful for a lot of things in my life but most grateful for this little guy

New paper:
More than 2700 human 3′UTRs are highly conserved. These 3′UTRs are essential components in mRNA templates, as their deletion decreases protein activity without changing protein abundance. Highly conserved 3′UTRs help the folding of proteins with long IDRs.

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

Long-read transcriptome assembly reveals vast isoform diversity in the placenta associated with metabolic and endocrine function The placenta plays a critical role in fetal development and mediates maternal metabolic effects on offspring health outcomes. Despite its importance, the placenta remains understudied in large-scale g...

🧬🚨PREPRINT🚨- The first placental isoform reference from long-read seq & supporting data! We demonstrate how tissue-specific assembly improves transcript quantification with short-read data from multi-ancestry birth studies & reveals placenta-mediated effects of gestational diabetes on birth weight🫄

the year 4 "can't wait to be a PI" to the year 5 "hopefully I can at least keep my current job for another year or two" senior postdoctoral fellow in 2025 pipeline

preparation of cell-based therapies requires specialized training that takes 4 to 6 months

the PI asked to re-hire his own team

NIH leadership refused, suggesting contractors or temps from elsewhere in NIH

this ignorant suggestion amounts to "replace the surgeon with a pilot or flight attendant"

forgot to follow the golden rule of social media: never post. followed by the titanium rule of social media: never ever ever share a public thought about motherhood lol

also illness in the summer should be illegal ❤️

signed, a mom desperately trying to get some writing done during nap time