Monika Piwecka
LightNews LightNews
banner
monikapiwecka.bsky.social
Monika Piwecka
@monikapiwecka.bsky.social
200 followers 360 following 6 posts
RNA biologist
non-coding RNAs | RNA-protein interactions | gene expression regulation | brain 🧠 & neuroendocrine system
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
monikapiwecka.bsky.social
Monika Piwecka @monikapiwecka.bsky.social · Jan 31
I am glad to share that our study on RNA-protein interactions in the brain affected by myelin deficiency has been published in the latest
Cell Reports issue.
😊🤠
Except for insights into RBPs, you will find there also something about circRNAs (of course!) :)
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
Interrogation of RNA-bound proteome with XRNAX illuminates molecular alterations in the mouse brain affected with dysmyelination
Myelin deficiency in the central nervous system leads to severe neurological dysfunctions. Sztachera et al. probe RNA-protein interactions in the myelin-deficient mouse brain in a high-throughput mann...
www.cell.com
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
jeroenpasterkamp.bsky.social
Exciting opportunity to learn about #humanbrainmodels and #singlecelltechnology! July 13-17 2026 we for the first time will offer the Utrecht Summer School titled "Advanced human brain models in the single-cell era" for master and PhD students. Apply now: utrechtsummerschool.nl/courses/life...
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
lnkd.in
December 13, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
kimlanelaw.bsky.social
All travelers from ESTA countries (yes the ones on visa waiver programs) will have to disclose 5 years of social media + huge amounts of personal data to enter the US now. All US academic associations should now meet outside the US if we want to meet our international colleagues.
clarajeffery.bsky.social Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · 6d
This is INSANE www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/t...

and these are our closest allies!
Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The change would affect visitors eligible for the visa waiver program, which allows people from 42 countries to travel to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa as long as they first obtain electronic travel authorization. In a document filed on Tuesday in the Federal Register, C.B.P. said it plans to ask applicants for a long list of personal data including social media, email addresses from the last decade, and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children. Under the current system, applicants from visa waiver countries must enroll in the Electronic System for Travel Authorization program. They pay $40 and submit an email address, home address, phone number and emergency contact information. The authorization is good for two years.
December 10, 2025 at 4:27 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
jmtali.bsky.social
Announcing the 2026 edition of the EMBO workshop on RNA localization and local translation! This meeting will be held June 30 - July 4 near Porto, Portugal. Come for exciting updates in the field from both established investigators and trainees. See the link below for details!
December 8, 2025 at 4:40 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
lablerit.bsky.social
Join us in Porto for the forefront of RNA localization & local translation research! Registration is live!
December 8, 2025 at 9:46 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
areslab.bsky.social
Hey everyone, the RNA Society is running an RNA Infographic Contest! Get your team together and create! There are prizes!
A graphic including a QR code that describes the RNA Society's Infographic contest.
December 9, 2025 at 2:14 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social
"Features and biomedical relevance of circular RNA biogenesis"
by Xiaolin Wang & Ge Shan

"Recently, modulation of circRNA biogenesis to generate tissue-specific expression patterns is coming into focus. We summarize various mechanisms involved..."

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
Figure 1. Mechanisms of biogenesis of circular RNA (circRNA) subclasses and the biomedical relevance of the RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) involved.
December 5, 2025 at 9:53 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
ilegnini.bsky.social
Still a couple of weeks to apply for a fully funded PhD position in #AI and #RNA biology!!!
ilegnini.bsky.social Ivano Legnini @ilegnini.bsky.social · 22d
And in addition to the postdoc position (1 week left to apply!), just opened a PhD position in AI and RNA biology 🤩
December 4, 2025 at 8:17 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
carolynbertozzi.bskyverified.social
Wow
maxkozlov.bsky.social Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 24d
About that exclusive, "closed-to-press" MAHA summit last week with RFK and JD Vance: I got in.

Here's what I saw. 🧵 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
A glorious selfie with the official MAHA lanyard seconds after I made it past Secret Service screening.
November 21, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
patrialvarezcam.bsky.social
Join our upcoming course on cutting-edge evolutionary & genomic methods for Evo-Devo studies!
We'll cover: comparative & single-cell transcriptomics,ATAC-seq, phylogenomics, comparative genomics, gene regulation, and much more
Spots still available: sites.google.com/view/evodevo...
jordisolana.bsky.social Jordi Solana @jordisolana.bsky.social · Nov 14
I will be participating in this EvoDevo course in Madrid, organised by @patrialvarezcam.bsky.social and other colleagues.

sites.google.com/view/evodevo...

I will be covering scRNA-seq, other topics are transcriptomics, ATAC-seq, phylogenomics

Registration closes on Nov 20!

Dates: Dec 15-18
November 14, 2025 at 1:48 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
profmarciniak.bsky.social
Some good news

New data published by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) shows the 2025/26 vaccine is currently 70 to 75% effective at preventing hospital attendance in children aged 2 to 17 years and 30 to 40% effective in adults.
www.gov.uk/government/n...
Flu vaccine providing important protection despite new subclade
UKHSA’s early season data shows vaccination remains best defence alongside good respiratory hygiene as flu activity rises.
www.gov.uk
November 15, 2025 at 10:27 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
marmole6.bsky.social
🦣🧬🦣🤯💥We are pleased to share our new paper about ancient RNA expression profiles from the Woolly Mammoth, now published in Cell @cellpress.bsky.social

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

If you want to know more, read the 🧵 below:
November 14, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
oden-gjallarhornet.bsky.social
Yuka The Woolly #Mammoth Just Gave Us The Oldest #RNA Ever Sequenced

www.sciencealert.com/yuka-the-woo...
Yuka The Woolly Mammoth Just Gave Us The Oldest RNA Ever Sequenced
A woolly mammoth that lived and died nearly 40,000 years ago has given us a spectacular scientific first, millennia later.
www.sciencealert.com
November 15, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
events.embl.org
How to tackle emerging questions in cellular organisation, adaptation, and robustness? Join #EESPhaseSeparation! 🧬🦠

Bringing together scientists from diverse fields to foster new discoveries in condensate biology.

Submit your abstract by 10 Feb: s.embl.org/ees26-08-bl

📅 19 – 22 May 2026
November 13, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
biovoxxel.de
Ever wondered if analyzing your images by using intensity Z-projections impacts your data?

Happy to announce my guest article in Microscopy & Analysis on that topic. It's a very short read but worth for everyone dealing with image analysis!

buff.ly/KJ147tI

#Microscopy #ZProjection #ImageAnalysis
November 10, 2025 at 4:05 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
ilegnini.bsky.social
1/6 We are hiring!!! 🐣🐣🐣
Fully funded postdoc position in my group!
humantechnopole.it/en/research-...
Legnini Group - Human Technopole
Laboratory for Molecular and Systems Biology of RNA   The Legnini Group at Human Technopole combines molecular and systems biology approaches to study gene regulation. We use synthetic biology and opt...
humantechnopole.it
November 6, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
potoyan.bsky.social
Our RNA condensate work is finally out! Using simulations, we uncover the origin of the lower critical solution temperature (LCST) behaviour underlying thermo, iono-sensing functions in pure RNA condensates. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
November 4, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
jmbujnicki.bsky.social
Exciting news for the RNA research community!

The Human RNome Project has been launched: a global effort to map all human RNAs and their chemical modifications. Proud to support it and contribute to the article in Genome Biology doi.org/10.1186/s130...
#RNA #bioinformatics #RNAstructure #modomics
Unlocking the regulatory code of RNA: launching the Human RNome Project - Genome Biology
The human RNome, the complete set of RNA molecules in human cells, arises through complex processing and includes diverse molecular species. While research traditionally focuses on four canonical nucl...
genomebiology.biomedcentral.com
October 25, 2025 at 10:27 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
adrianwoolfson.bsky.social
An extraordinary result for ipilimumab immunotherapy given as a first line therapy for glioblastoma

share.google/485XFZxmBm26...
Dad’s aggressive brain cancer vanishes after taking new drug
The NHS is now looking for patients with glioblastoma to take part in a new drug trial
share.google
November 1, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
pawelburkhardt.bsky.social
First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience

Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com
Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E

@jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social
The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution
Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Recent studies have shed further light on the evolutionary origins of chemical synapses, In this Review, Colgren and Burkhardt explore how ancient proteins were...
rdcu.be
October 27, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
piotraz.bsky.social
⏰ Last week to apply!
Don’t miss the chance to join our lab and explore the fascinating world of meiotic recombination 🌿
👉 Deadline: Nov 1, 2025
piotraz.bsky.social Piotr Ziolkowski @piotraz.bsky.social · Sep 27
🚀 We’re hiring a Postdoc!

Join our group in Poznan, Poland to study meiotic crossover recombination in plants 🌱 Highly motivated & enthusiastic candidates are welcome!
📅 Deadline: Nov 1, 2025

🔗 ibmib.web.amu.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Postdoc_position-2025-Ziolkowskis-Lab.pdf
October 25, 2025 at 5:48 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
jasonsynaptic.bsky.social
For obvious reasons, I've become fascinated with retrotransposons. So we ( @alexwhiteley.bsky.social and I) wrote an article now out in Neuron @cellpress.bsky.social on how we think retrotransposons influence brain function and health! kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...
October 20, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
rnacentral.bsky.social
🎉 RNAcentral Release 26 is here! This release introduces our biggest structural change yet: gene-level entries for ncRNAs across 204 organisms.
For the first time, you can explore RNA data at the gene level, not just individual sequences.
🧵👇
October 8, 2025 at 10:09 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
samulireijula.net
excellent essay: The Origin of the Research University open.substack.com/pub/asterisk...
The Origin of the Research University
Universities have existed for more than a thousand years — and for almost all of that time, they weren’t centers of research. What changed in 19th century Germany?
open.substack.com
October 10, 2025 at 5:04 AM
Reposted by Monika Piwecka
jorg-vogel-lab.bsky.social
Two group leader positions available in the broader areas of RNA science, RNA technologies, and RNA medicine. Attractive packages and a great environment. Come and join us at Helmholtz RNA Würzburg, Bavaria.
October 8, 2025 at 9:45 PM