Wendy Bickmore
@wbickmor.bsky.social
2.9K followers 46 following 32 posts
Scientist at University of Edinburgh. Director of MRC Human Genetics Unit but posting in my own capacity.
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Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
gurdoninstitute.bsky.social
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...
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
uoe-igc.bsky.social
We're all ready for #DoorsOpenDays2025 tomorrow and looking forward to showing off a snapshot of the work we do at the Institute 🔬🧬🥼🧪 🧫
@cmvm-edinburghuni.bsky.social
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
marcishore.bsky.social
Dan's latest song, for Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and all the comedians out there--
Dan Shore - Nothing Hurts Me More
YouTube video by danshoremusic
www.youtube.com
wbickmor.bsky.social
Honoured to be in Birmingham to mark Bryan Turner’s retirement- a gentleman and giant of epigenetics.
wbickmor.bsky.social
Well, we survived our ERC Synergy interview. So exciting working with this great GeneMotors team of SMC experts @ceesdekker.bsky.social Benjamin Rowland, Leonid Mirny. Here's hoping we can continue working together for the next 6 years.
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
ceesdekker.bsky.social
preparing for our ERC Synergy Grant interview tomorrow!

#rehearsingrehearsingrehearsing
wbickmor.bsky.social
Working class women makes inadvertent mistake and resigns.
Posh bloke uses devious means to avoid paying income tax and stamp duty... and doesn't resign.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
andrewwood.bsky.social
Our manuscript characterising tissue-specific consequences of tagged protein fusions in CRISPR-engineered mice is now online @PLOSGenetics. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics.... Thanks again to all coauthors, reviewers and editors for a smooth publication process. Brief summary below.
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
jmarshlab.bsky.social
New paper out today in PLOS Comp Biol:
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Intrinsically disordered regions make variant prediction deceptively easy for benign changes but very hard for pathogenic ones. Our work shows why current tools struggle here, and why disorder-aware approaches are needed.
Assessing variant effect predictors and disease mechanisms in intrinsically disordered proteins
Author summary Some parts of proteins, known as intrinsically disordered regions, do not fold into fixed shapes. Instead, they stay flexible and play key roles in controlling how cells work, often by ...
journals.plos.org
wbickmor.bsky.social
GWAS to mechanism: when non-coding is coding. Beautiful insightful science from @gweykopf.bsky.social @simonbiddie.bsky.social Joe Marsh and many colleagues. @uoe-igc.bsky.social @cmvm-edinburghuni.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
wbickmor.bsky.social
Great to see this published @genesdev.bsky.social. Evidence that enhancers can activate a bystander gene in an adjacent TAD, and that cohesin facilitates this. @uoe-igc.bsky.social.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40436628/
wbickmor.bsky.social
Exquisite work. Well done to the whole team.
danielibrahim.bsky.social
How to find Evolutionary Conserved Enhancers in 2025? 🐣-🐭
Check out our paper - fresh off the press!!!
We find widespread functional conservation of enhancers in absence of sequence homology
Including: a bioinformatic tool to map sequence-diverged enhancers!
rdcu.be/enVDN
github.com/tobiaszehnde...
Conservation of regulatory elements with highly diverged sequences across large evolutionary distances
Nature Genetics - Combining functional genomic data from mouse and chicken with a synteny-based strategy identifies positionally conserved cis-regulatory elements in the absence of direct sequence...
rdcu.be
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
richardsever.bsky.social
Non-profit journals are on the critical list.

The cause: academics obsession with the Nature brand, coupled with the APC $ model.

Some will argue it doesn’t matter (“all as bad as each other”). But the fact is undeniable and it’s good guys who put money back into science like COB who are losing..
seemagrewal.bsky.social
Thanks @mitodynamics.bsky.social for the fun interview and for saying it like it is:

“…JCS and other community journals are being crushed by the mega profit-making journals, which just seem to proliferate and spit out new journals by the day…we must all make an effort to move away from this…”
jcellsci.bsky.social
In our Special Issue: Cell Biology of Mitochondria we interview Guest Editor Heidi McBride @mitodynamics.bsky.social Heidi discusses her career path, the past, present & future of #mitochondria research & her role as guest editor at JCS.
journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
#JCSMitoSI
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
eimearlagan.bsky.social
Excited to share our new paper out today in @cp-molcell.bsky.social! We show that the H3K27M oncohistone rewires cPRC1, creating a unique dependency on CBX4/PCGF4-containing complexes, and also reveal a previously unknown function of CBX4. Highlights below (1/11).
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
jackwallington.com
“I certainly do not let myself be underpaid as many women do. There are people who write to me and think because I am a woman I will ask less than a man. This I never do. I know my profession and charge accordingly, as all women should do.” I love this 💞 www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
‘She changed the face of London’: statue to be unveiled of suffragist gardener
Fanny Wilkinson designed 75 parks in the capital, the first UK female landscape gardener to be paid for her work
www.theguardian.com
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
wbickmor.bsky.social
Nonsense mediated decay has taken hold.
wbickmor.bsky.social
ZC3HC1 and TPR is not required for TPR localisation at the nuclear pore basket, and the two have different functions. wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/10-...
wbickmor.bsky.social
Time for us all to re-read Orwell’s 1984.
wbickmor.bsky.social
So well deserved. Congratulations Cees.
wbickmor.bsky.social
Eric Green is a giant of the Human Genome Project. His legacy of discoveries, enhancing human knowledge and humanity, is engraved in the scientific literature and cannot be erased. Something these philistines who have seized power will never understand.

www.deiwatchlist.com/dossier/eric...
Eric Green - DEI Watch List
www.deiwatchlist.com
Reposted by Wendy Bickmore
greally.bsky.social
OK, I'm not going to say a word about this.

Go ahead and list what's wrong with this study. We need a generation of reviewers to be confident expressing their concerns, just as we need researchers not to perform these wasteful and damaging studies in the first place.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
wbickmor.bsky.social
The Review Commons system tries to partly address this by having one set of peer reviewer comments that you can take to different journals.