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Jeffrey Townsend

@jeffreytownsend.bsky.social

3.6K followers 2.6K following 270 posts

Elihu Professor of Biostatistics @yalesph.bsky.social--Cancer, Infectious disease, Evolutionary biology, Fungi, sometimes running

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Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · Jul 22

🧪 How fast does gene expression evolve?
A new molecular clock for expression evolution: this study tracked ~4,000 genes across 9 species of fungi . Some genes' expression barely changes in 900M yrs, others shift in just 7M.

doi.org/10.1093/molb...

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Yale Cancer Center @yalecancer.bsky.social · 5d

Some #lungcancers with #KRAS G12C mutations respond to #immunotherapy bc of⬆️ mutation load from #tobacco exposure. Smoking history + overall mutation burden are better guides for treatment than KRAS status alone.
lungcancerjournal.info/article/S016...
@jeffreytownsend.bsky.social

KRAS G12C-associated immunotherapy benefit in NSCLC is substantially mediated by tobacco-induced tumor mutation burden, not allele-specific effects

KRAS G12C mutations in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have been associated with improved immune-checkpoint inhibition (ICI) outcomes. However, it remains unclear whether this benefit reflects alle...

lungcancerjournal.info

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Mrs. Betty Bowers @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social · 15d

DISNEY: "OK, we are putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. You can resubscribe now."

ME: "I unsubscribed because you immorally bowed to fascism. I'm not going to resubscribe because you immorally bowed to finances."

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Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · 15d

Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars - defector.com/neither-elon...

Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars | Defector

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic ac...

defector.com

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Lisa Guerrero @lisaguerrero.bsky.social · 16d

Bye bye, rodent nation.
#BoycottDisney

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · Aug 19

will be speaking in

The Distinguished Speaker Series: AI & Health Science

📅 September 19, on “Dismantling the Coarse Paradigm of Cancer ‘Drivers’ and ‘Passengers’”

📍 University at Buffalo Clinical and Translational Science Institute

In person or Zoom — register 🔗: qrco.de/AIHS-DSS

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Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · 23d

Student performance tracks district income—linear in some states, leveling in others. It’s steepest in less-affluent states, and math slips from grade 3→8. Our kids deserve better than fate by zip code—and the variance in slope tells us we can do better.

🔗 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

The functional form of the association between K-12 student performance and household income in U.S. school districts

It is well-known that income can correlate with the academic performance of K-12 students in the United States (U.S.). However, the mathematical relationship between income and K-12 performance, and h...

journals.plos.org

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Jen Bendery @jbendery.bsky.social · Sep 1

Photo passed along from a federal employee from inside the Dept of Labor building, where a giant Orwellian image of Trump's face is now draped outside.

Big Brother is watching.

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Alison Feder @alisonfeder.bsky.social · 28d

Sam Hart describes and applies a method to distinguish differences in mutational processes between groups of cancers without signature decomposition (joint work with @kelleyharris.bsky.social and in collaboration with @nalcala.bsky.social )! #Genomics 🖥️ 🧬

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

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Alison Feder @alisonfeder.bsky.social · 28d

Elena Romero led a new preprint detailing joint work with Lillian Cohn's lab at Fred Hutch describing really crazy parallelism in in vivo HIV escape from broadly neutralizing antibodies! #VirEvol #evoSky

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

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Jon Cooper @joncooper-us.bsky.social · Sep 5

California, Oregon and Washington announced yesterday they’ve created their own health alliance, saying the CDC has become “a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science.”

New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have now done the same.

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Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · Sep 6

youtube.com/shorts/AYm9w...

For our scientists

YouTube video by Elle Cordova

youtube.com

Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

LillianDCA @lillianorlando.bsky.social · Sep 5

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Friday morning explicitly allowing pharmacists to prescribe and administer the shot to New Yorkers who request it.

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Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · Sep 4

This is THE WAY, but build a Coastal Coalition including all Pacific, Atlantic, (& Great Lakes?) States. Everything that is defunded at the federal level we can build up Coastally. Because Coastal States are net givers federally, defunding federally then equals a net benefit for coastal states.

Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · Sep 4

Hawaii announced they are joining California, Oregon, and Washington’s West Coast Health Alliance which will provide their own science-based vaccine guidelines and make vaccines accessible to everyone.

Hawaii to join West Coast Health Alliance with California, Oregon, and Washington
SACRAMENTO – Roughly 24 hours after the launch of the West Coast Health Alliance, Hawaii is joining California, Oregon, and Washington in a shared commitment to safeguard public health. Together, these states will provide evidence-based immunization guidance rooted in safety, efficacy, and transparency — ensuring residents receive credible information free from political interference.

Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Jason Stajich @hyphaltip.bsky.social · Aug 21

Assistant/ Associate Professor of Mycology at UGA - Go be part of a Legendary Fungal Group fungi.franklinresearch.uga.edu and dept of plant pathology plantpath.caes.uga.edu www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/445...

Assistant or Associate Professor - Fungal Biology/Mycology

The Department of Plant Pathology in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) at the University of Georgia is recruiting for the position of Assistant or Associate Professor in Fu...

www.ugajobsearch.com

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Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · Sep 3

scienmag.com/boosting-mrn...

Boosting mRNA Vaccines with Cutting-Edge Technology

Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines revolutionized public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, representing a groundbreaking shift away from traditional vaccine design. Unlike conventional vaccines that

scienmag.com

Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · Sep 3

news.yale.edu/2025/08/18/r...

Risk management: Making gene therapy safer and more effective

Yale researchers have created a new RNA editing tool that can take some of the risk out of gene therapy.

news.yale.edu

Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Jo Rhodes @drjorhodes.com · Aug 11

Stellar work by graduate students to build this comprehensive dataset of antifungal resistance mechanisms. Kudos and congratulations to the Landry lab @christianlandry.bsky.social

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

FungAMR: a comprehensive database for investigating fungal mutations associated with antimicrobial resistance - Nature Microbiology

An online, manually curated and continually updating database of fungal antimicrobial resistance mutations provides a starting point for further research in fungal AMR.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Matthew Hahn @3rdreviewer.bsky.social · Sep 1

New paper led by @yadirapga.bsky.social!

Opossums have babies at 6-months of age, but are still highly male-biased in their mutations

academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Low mutation rate but high male-bias in the germline of a short-lived opossum

Abstract. Age and sex have been found to be important determinants of the mutation rate per generation in mammals, but the mechanisms underlying these fact

academic.oup.com

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

💙 Happysnarkygal 💙 @happysnarkygal.bsky.social · Sep 1

Well, well, well…this bodes well for Whackadoodle limiting access to the Covid vaccine now doesn’t it? www.kctv5.com/2025/08/28/k...

Kansas City Catholic school to remain closed for the week due to COVID-19

A KCK Catholic school will remain closed due to COVID-19.

www.kctv5.com

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Jeffrey Townsend @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social · Sep 1

New Proc B study 🧪 reveals up to 8.5× differences in muscle mitochondrial efficiency across ectothermic vertebrates. Evolution tunes energy, leak, and ROS control in surprising ways.

🦎🐸🦎

#Evolution #Mitochondria

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Evolutionary diversity of muscle OXPHOS efficiency in vitro across ectothermic vertebrates | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Oxidative metabolism meets the majority of vertebrate energy demands through the coupling of mitochondrial respiration to ATP production (OXPHOS). In endotherms, variations in OXPHOS coupling efficien...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Molecular Biology and Evolution @molbioevol.bsky.social · Sep 1

The September cover of Molecular Biology and Evolution features the work of Zhang et al., who studied the genetics of cave adaptation in Triplophysa fish.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf175

📷 Yahui Zhao / Fanwei Meng

#evobio #molbio

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Casey Dunn @caseywdunn.bsky.social · Jun 11

I hope to take a PhD student in the coming application cycle. Please reach out if you are interested in joining our lab in EEB at Yale, especially if interested in working on the natural history/ phylogenetics/ morphology/ population biology/ development/ genomics of siphonophores. dunnlab.org

The Dunn Lab

Casey Dunn's laboratory in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University.

dunnlab.org

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Muzumdar Lab @muzumdarlab.bsky.social · Aug 26

💡 Cancer cells don’t just mutate—they reorganize their DNA in 3D space.
Our new study shows how the genome’s folding pattern shifts as tumors progress, cell by cell 🧩🧬.
It’s the first 3D genome atlas of cancer progression.
Thread 👇

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Muzumdar Lab @muzumdarlab.bsky.social · Aug 26

7/ This was a close collaboration with @sstevenwang.bsky.social. Kudos to #MiaoLiu, #SherryAgabiti, and #ShengyanJin for leading the effort with critical collaboration from @christianfruiz.bsky.social @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social @yalecancer.bsky.social and funding from #NCI @theaacr.bsky.social

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Reposted by Jeffrey Townsend

Yale Cancer Center @yalecancer.bsky.social · Aug 26

A study led by @jeffreytownsend.bsky.social reveals #tobacco alters lung #adenocarcinoma evolution: smokers’ tumors favor KRAS/KEAP1/STK11, never-smokers’ favor EGFR/PIK3CA—revealing distinct treatment vulnerabilities.
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
@toomuchvitamink.bsky.social

Tobacco smoke alters the trajectory of lung adenocarcinoma evolution via effects on somatic selection and epistasis

Background Tobacco smoke is a known mutagen. However, its physiological effects on the lung may also influence the somatic selective pressures acting on mutations, further shaping cancer evolution. Th...

biorxiv.org

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