Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Luisa Cochella

Ishmail Abdus-Saboor @ishmailsaboor.bsky.social · 19h

Congrats to the winners! Its notable that Omar Yaghi was a refugee. Refugees and immigrants once again making American science great!

Nature @nature.com · 23h

BREAKING: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “for the development of metal-organic frameworks”

Stay tuned for more.
#NobelPrize

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Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge @gurdoninstitute.bsky.social · 20h

It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death of our founder, colleague, mentor and friend, Professor Sir John Gurdon. His vision and dedication will continue to inspire generations of scientists.
🔗 www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/nobel-laurea...

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Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 8d

Staff members at the NIH seem to have done the impossible: spend the agency's $48 billion budget.

“Everyone has been rallying together to clean up the mess, but it’s a mess that did not need to be made,” an NIH program officer told me.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NIH races to spend its 2025 grant money — but fewer projects win funding

Despite political obstacles, officials are on track to disburse all of the research funds allocated to US biomedical behemoth.

www.nature.com

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Pam Davis-Kean, PhD @umpamdk.bsky.social · 9d

Thank you all the program officers at NIH that persisted through the 2025 fiscal year and were able to fund 99% of the total FY2024 budget. I know this has take a toll on everyone at NIH. Thank you for supporting important health and behavior science and helping to keep the U.S. a leader in science.

Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 9d

The fiscal year ends tomorrow.

Here are results from NIH Reporter downloaded an hour ago.

The total amount of funding committed for FY2025 at this point is 99.0% of that for FY2024. The same difference could be due to a variety of technical factors.

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$A graph showing the fraction of annual grant funding committed for NIH for fiscal years 2015 to 2025. The fiscal year 2025 lagged behind but then caught up over the last two months.$

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Surojit Sural @surojitsural.bsky.social · 14d

Very excited to share this finding from my postdoctoral work that is now published in #ScienceAdvances. We show how the gut’s epithelium modifies enteric behaviors during nutritional adversity via distinct peptidergic signaling axes.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thread ⬇️

(1/n)

Gut epithelium modifies enteric behaviors during nutritional adversity via distinct peptidergic signaling axes

Gut epithelium modulates output from distinct enteric circuits by altering secretion of insulin and noninsulin peptides.

www.science.org

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Grosshans Lab @labgrosshans.bsky.social · Sep 8

Thanks for highlighting - thread to follow. Mini-summary: beyond assigning oscillatory genes expression by scRNA-seq to individual cell types, we also show that chromatin opens rhythmically and that we can predict this (and gene expression) with a small set of TFs in a mathematical model.

Max Heiman @heiman.bsky.social · Sep 7

It accompanies a beautiful preprint from @labgrosshans.bsky.social whose pioneering work laid the foundation for the approach we took:
"A scheduler for rhythmic gene expression"
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

A scheduler for rhythmic gene expression

Genetic oscillators drive precisely timed gene expression, crucial for development and physiology. Using the C. elegans molting clock as a model, we investigate how oscillators can schedule the orderl...

doi.org

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Max Heiman @heiman.bsky.social · Sep 7

New preprint!

How are developmental cycles coordinated across cell types?

It turns out that, like Geppetto's cuckoo clocks in the GIF below, individual cell types are each performing their own little crazy routine, but all in sync with each other.

a bunch of clocks are hanging on a wall including one that says ' 3:00 ' on it

ALT: a bunch of clocks are hanging on a wall including one that says ' 3:00 ' on it

media.tenor.com

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Current Biology @currentbiology.bsky.social · Sep 7

David Baltimore, giant of molecular biology, has died.

Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · Sep 7

Co-discoverer of reverse transcriptase at 32, Nobel Prize at 37, played a key role at the 1975 Asilomar comference.

David Baltimore, Nobel-Winning Molecular Biologist, Dies at 87

www.nytimes.com

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W. Brent Derry @wbderry.bsky.social · Sep 6

Go Mei!

Miriam B. Goodman, PhD @wormsense.bsky.social · Sep 6

Please help me to celebrate Mei Zhen, an innovator and tremendous collaborator, named to the Royal Society of Canada Academy of Science on September 4, 2025

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paveltomancak.bsky.social @paveltomancak.bsky.social · Sep 4

We are all super happy and proud to see our work on the function and evolution of the #cephalic #furrow published in @nature.com. Let me say a few things about the background and history of this work on the #Evolution_of_Morphogenesis (1/12)

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Luisa Cochella @lcochella.bsky.social · Sep 4

Thanks Eric!
Made possible by CRISPR technology, Emilio's expert design and injection skills, and loads of Cas9 purified and gifted to us by Geraldine Seydoux's lab... and a pinch of craziness : )

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Luisa Cochella @lcochella.bsky.social · Sep 3

Thanks, Andi : )

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Luisa Cochella @lcochella.bsky.social · Sep 3

We loved working with you Ralf! We gave you a little shoutout in the acknowledgements, but we always remember that you were the one who noticed the kal-1 reporter under the microscope : )

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Luisa Cochella @lcochella.bsky.social · Sep 3

Lots more to dig into in the paper : )
Congrats Emilio and everyone involved!!!

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Luisa Cochella @lcochella.bsky.social · Sep 3

In a tour de force experiment, Emilio made a worm strain with 13 variant 3'UTRs, mutating the miR-51/miR-100 binding sites in high confidence targets. This phenocopies some of the defects observed upon loss of the miRNA, providing causality between modest derepression of many targets and phenotype!

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Luisa Cochella @lcochella.bsky.social · Sep 3

Our work on the function of miR-51/miR-100 is out! miR-100 is widely conserved across eumetazoans but its function has been mysterious. Emilio Santillán found in worms it regulates signaling and extracellular matrix genes, some of which seem to be conserved targets! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

An ancient and essential miRNA family controls cellular interaction pathways in C. elegans

A microRNA that arose at the origin of eumetazoans regulates cell adhesion and signaling in C. elegans through conserved targets.

www.science.org

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Luisa Cochella @lcochella.bsky.social · Aug 28

Amazing! And the jokers are 🔥😂

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Petr Svoboda @svobodalab.bsky.social · Aug 28

The Argonautes 2025 - we made a special gift for participants - a card set with 32 different Argonautes + an extension pack with four Nobel prize winners from the small RNA field. Mello, Fire, Ambros & Ruvkun as jokers :-) #argonautes2025

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Max Heiman @heiman.bsky.social · Jul 2

Huge thanks to Cathy Savage-Dunn @cswormlab.bsky.social and Baris Tursun @baristursun.bsky.social for an amazing #worm25 !!

I want to call out the OUTSTANDING meeting they created! Talks and posters were A+++. Most of all they brought us together in one of the most challenging times we've had.

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Baris Tursun @baristursun.bsky.social · Jul 2

Special thanks to Ahna Skop, Morris Maduro, and Curtis Loer for bringing so much joy to the meeting!
Also, big thanks to GSA and Anne Marie Mahoney for making #worm25 happen despite the challenging times. Thank you also to USDavis for hosting us and the delicious food.

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Baris Tursun @baristursun.bsky.social · Jul 2

We are looking forward to the Worm Meeting 2027 and thank
Suhong Xu(Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China),
Kavita Babu (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India), and
Erik Andersen (Johns Hopkins
University Baltimore, USA)
for organising. #worm25

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Luisa Cochella @lcochella.bsky.social · Jul 3

Congrats to all, including Lo-Yu Chang from our lab 😁

Tina L. Gumienny @drgtwu.bsky.social · Jul 3

Congrats to the winners of the #Worm25 poster competition!

Thanks to all students who entered (285) — such great research!

Thanks to all poster judge volunteers who judged presenters (220 postdocs and faculty!)

Given >1200 attendees, that’s a high % who participated in this competition!

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versteegga.bsky.social @versteegga.bsky.social · May 1

New paper out in @natcomms.nature.com! A surprising story of a "non-conserved" protein that's vital for human cell fitness! Fantastic work by Alexandra Shulkina in collaboration with the @lcochella.bsky.social & @clausenlab.bsky.social labs.

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Jeff Coller @jmcoller.bsky.social · Mar 14

Our dean is taking the message to where it needs to hit.

www.foxnews.com/opinion/cutt...

Cutting NIH funding isn’t how to defeat disease, it’s surrender

Plans to cut NIH funding undermine America's incredible record of medical success. Scientific research has helped win many battler against horrible diseases. We should be proud.

www.foxnews.com

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Denis Wirtz @deniswirtz.bsky.social · Mar 13

"Funding from the NIH was contributed to 354 of 356 drugs (99.4%) approved from 2010 to 2019 totaling $187 billion"

Reference: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

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