Alex Cagan
@ATJCagan
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Researching somatic evolution at the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Sanger Institute. Also a scientific illustrator.
Cambridge
Joined July 2013
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Congratulations to Svante Pääbo, my PhD supervisor, for his
#NobelPrize
“for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”
@MPI_EVA_Leipzig
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I am incredibly excited to share our preprint ‘Somatic mutation rates scale with lifespan across mammals’In this paper we provide an unprecedented description of somatic mutation across mammals.
An illustrated tweetorial…[1/17]
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Thrilled to announce I am starting an Assistant Professorship at the University of Cambridge to study somatic evolution across the tree of life, with a focus on ageing, cancer and environmental monitoring. Exciting times ahead!
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Organising a conference/symposium/webinar and want the talks and speakers to be live illustrated? Drop me a line!
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It was a privilege to do an illustration of
@firefoxx66
, researcher and developer of
@nextstrain
She’s using phylogenetics to track
#COVID
ー19 This vital work can help keep it under control. Scientists like Emma are the modern day Artemis, hunting viruses!
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Thrilled to announce an illustrated book to celebrate the
#25genomes
project and
@sangerinstitute
25th anniversary! The grandest illustration project I have ever done. Such an honour to work here as an artist and a scientist with such fantastic colleagues.
#sciart
@wellcometrust
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Celebrating all the Heroes across the world from different walks of life who are working tirelessly to fight
#COVID19
While they are out there we can all do our part by staying inside to slow the spread
#scicomm
#SlowTheSpread
#FlattenTheCurve
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Thrilled to finally be able to share our new preprint on the mutational landscape of human somatic and germline cells!
#Panbodymap
We integrated histology and genomics to reveal the genomic diversity that develops within our own bodies as we age
[1/15]
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Dance of the Genome
Honoured to design the cover for the inaugural issue of
@CellGenomics
- a new
#OpenAccess
and
#OpenScience
research journal for pioneering
#genetics
and
#genomics
.
Had a great time working on this one!
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Inspired by the beautiful words and gestures of
@TheAmandaGorman
#illustration
#poetry
#TheHillWeClimb
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A homage to the inspiring illustrations of Beatrix Potter was explored
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Early ideas for the cover played around with the core concepts of mutation, animals and time
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Hugely honoured to have provided watercolours and a logo for the
#25genomes
project for the
@sangerinstitute
25th anniversary party and exhibition
#sciart
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The DNA in our bodies accumulates mutations as we age. We are studying how this somatic mutation rate varies across species (including lions and tigers!). This may provide insights into cancer and ageing
@sangerinstitute
@OfficialZSL
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For detailed illustration work like this I love using
@Procreate
on the ipad pro with the apple stylus. Every dot was lovingly drawn by hand, which was surprisingly relaxing!
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PhD defence complete, finally a doctor! Thanks to everyone for their support and to
@JesseDabney
for sketching the talk!
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Important questions remained unsolved. Cancer risk is expected to increase with body size. Yet across species there appears to be no correlation between body-size and cancer risk. Could somatic mutation rates have evolved to be lower in larger animals?[4/24]
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Eventually arriving at the concept of a circular mutational clock
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The four colours in the dots represent the four nucleotides of DNA while the dots themselves in their various sizes represent the process of mutation and allude to the clonal expansion plots found in papers such as Martincorena et al. 2015
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Biology twitter, if any labs out there have blood or tissue samples from individuals of known age from long-lived species and are interested in collaborating to understand the evolution of somatic mutation rates, please get in touch with me.
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Remarkably, we find an inverse scaling of somatic mutation rates with lifespan, a long-standing prediction of the somatic theory of ageing. This is consistent with a causative role of somatic mutations in ageing. Though we discuss other possible explanations [15/24]
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Happy birthday
#FredSanger
, double Nobel prize winner who self-described as 'just a chap who messed about in a lab'
#sciart
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Why did we do this? As we age our cells accumulate DNA damage. Accurately studying somatic mutation in normal tissues has only recently become possible and our knowledge of somatic mutation is currently very limited outside of humans. [3/24]
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This research was possible thanks to a team of incredible mammals incl. Adrian Baez-Ortega,
@nbrzozowska961
,
@AbascalFed
,
@TimCoorens
,
@andrewrjlawson
,
@_Luke_MRH_
,
@MathijsSanders
,
@redtbutler
,
@strandings_man
,
@psalmotoxin
, E. Murchison, M. Stratton and
@imartincorena
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Thrilled to share this work from the
@imartincorena
team led by
@AbascalFed
and others. We present a new ultra low error rate sequencing method, enabling the study of somatic mutations even in non-clonal tissues. With new insights about somatic mutation.
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First talk of
#singlecellgenomicsday
by
@satijalab
summarising the latest developments in single cell genomics
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Keynote by
@emiliahsc
on the role of introgression in human evolution at different time scales
#smbe23
#smbe2023
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Eric Nestler opens the 14th Annual Neuroscience retreat at the Riverside Church
@SinaiBrain
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How do majestic
#cetaceans
live so long and grow so large? What secrets of
#cancer
and
#ageing
might we find in their genomes? Love working on somatic mutation across species
@sangerinstitute
, also love the new animation features of
@Procreate
, my first animation!
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Delighted to see Svante win the Nobel Prize. He was a brilliant supervisor and mentor. Also great to see a Nobel Prize recognising the contribution of evolutionary genomics to how we understand ourselves.
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2022
#NobelPrize
in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”
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The colours trailing behind the second hand are meant to evoke trinucleotide plots, with the long red line emphasising that C>T is the dominant mutation type that we see (though I also had in mind the iconic light trails of Tron & Akira)
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Ageing happens to us all, yet the causes of ageing remain debated. For decades there's been speculation that somatic mutations may contribute to ageing. If true, theory predicts that somatic mutation rates would inversely correlate with lifespan across species.[5/24]
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In other words, despite ~30-fold variation in lifespan and ~40,000-fold variation in body-size, mutation burden at end of lifespan only varied by ~3-fold across species. [16/24]
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We worked with outstanding collaborators to obtain biological samples from 16 mammalian species with a range of body-sizes and lifespans (including the superstars of cancer and ageing studies: naked mole-rats!)[9/24]
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If you are interested in ageing please see Supplementary Note 1 for theoretical considerations on the evolution of ageing and the multifactorial nature of ageing that can help interpret and contextualise our findings [17/24]
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I’m making a high resolution signed digital copy of my
#Illustration
of scientists coming together to fight
#COVID2019
available free here: If you use it please consider donating to a relevant charity. If you’d like a signed print please contact me.
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Why colonic crypts? They are histologically identifiable units, relatively easy to laser micro-dissect. Plus, all cells in a crypt share a recent common ancestor, enabling us to quantify somatic mutation rates. Finally, all mammals have them [11/24]
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We speculate that somatic mutations could contribute to ageing through positive selection on mutations that cause clonal expansions of phenotypically aberrant cells. [18/24]
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To celebrate the release of the red
#squirrel
, grey squirrel and Eurasian
#otter
genomes by
@darwintreelife
here are their respective pages from the
@sangerinstitute
25 genomes book, with a little information about each animal and how knowing their genome could be useful
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We integrated histology and genomics to provide an unprecedented description of somatic mutation across mammals. [2/24]
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Now the real fun begins, as we seek to understand precisely which aspects of ageing might be impacted by somatic mutation. To what extent do these trends exist beyond mammals? Can we learn more about genome maintenance from studying long-lived species? Stay tuned… [23/24]
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Wohoo! The latest
@PacBio
collectible cards are here, featuring my illustrations from the
@sangerinstitute
25 genomes project. The Eurasian otter genome is about to be released by
@darwintreelife
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We note that the weak correlation between body mass and somatic mutation rate after correcting for lifespan suggests lowering the mutation rate has not been a common mechanism to reduce cancer risk in large bodied species. Other mechanisms seem more likely. [22/24]
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Honoured to have my
#COVID19
illustration adapted for the cover of
@TrendsinPharma
The June issue of Trends in Pharmacological Sciences is now online. Check out the cover art by
@ATJCagan
which he kindly shared with
@TrendsinPharma
(thank you!). The issue marks the first COVID-19 paper published in the journal
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In other words, we would expect species that live short lives to accumulate somatic mutations relatively quickly…[6/24]
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Truly inspirational talk by
@ceclindgren
on mentorship, authenticity and defining what success means to you
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My first time giving a talk on the importance of creativity in science, and what 'tools for thinking' scientists share with artists. To the awesome multidisciplinary audience at
#CancerEvoEco24
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Opening talk of
#singlecellgenomicsday
by
@satijalab
on the latest advances in single cell genomics
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Positively-selected somatic mutations in stem cells would favour proliferation over differentiation and could lead to biased cell fates, resulting in cell type imbalances. [19/24]
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Despite having diverse diets and life histories we found remarkable similarities in the mutational spectra of each species. [13/24]
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Thrilled to finally have the chance to see
@PardisSabeti
speak about her research. An inspirational scientist across multiple fields
#AGBT23
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Integrating histology, laser-capture microscopy and genomics we whole genome sequenced 208 individual intestinal crypts from 56 individuals [10/24]
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So, comparative analysis of somatic mutagenesis could shed light on the diversity of mutagenic processes across species and the role of somatic mutation in cancer and ageing.[8/24]
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So, while somatic point mutations appear unlikely to significantly contribute to ageing through direct deleterious effects on the mutant cells, positive selection of selfish mutant clones offers a plausible mechanism by which somatic mutations could contribute to ageing. [21/24]
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Great to see some of my illustrations of the latest research in cancer evolution featured in an exhibition
@ace_arizona
with artists, scientists and patients responding to cancer
#scicomm
#sciart
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A feature on our research into somatic mutation across species in the Guardian today
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We developed a pipeline to identify somatic mutations in each species despite variable genome assembly quality. We confirmed that crypts were clonal and mutations accumulated linearly with age across species [12/24]
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While we would expect species that live long lives to accumulate somatic mutations relatively slowly…[7/24]
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Telomere-to-telomere assemblies uncover secrets of ape sex chromosomes
@MakovaLab
gives keynote at
#SMBE2023
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While selection for increased proliferation in tissues maintained by self-duplication of differentiated stem cells could favour de-differentiation, loss of functional specialization and reduced production of key protein products. [20/24]
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Remarkably, we find an inverse scaling of somatic mutation rates with lifespan, a long-standing prediction of the somatic theory of ageing. This is consistent with a causative role of somatic mutations in ageing. Though we discuss other possible explanations. [14/17]
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Excited to launch my etsy store! … Includes the originals from the 'Through the Looking Glass' series. More soon.
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Raghaven Varadarajan on developing improved thermostable viral vaccine formulations through mutational scanning
#VariantEffect23
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Nick Loman aka
@pathogenomenick
reflects on his career at the intersection of biology, medicine and computing
5
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I've finally launched a website! A more permanent home for illustrations than the transient twittersphere.
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Opening talk of
#singlecellgenomicsday
by
@satijalab
who organises the event which is open to all and live streaming now!
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For those interested, happy to announce I’ve set up a ko-fi page to simplify commissions of scientific portraits and illustrations of prerecorded talks.
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