eric lai
@lucksmith
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i play indie rock and study fly mutants. small RNA/APA/splicing/m6A/Notch. neural development+behavior; genomic conflict+evolution. @lucksmith .bsky.social
new york
Joined July 2007
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Pinned Tweet
boxing day gift🎁!! last paper of year for the Lai Lab.
@Binglong15
study about miRNA control of the Drosophila auditory center, Johnson's Organ, gets the cover of year-end issue
@GenesDev
. its our 10th paper in G&D, thanks terri and laureen for support!
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@annamerlan
reminds me when i was walking thru times square and i heard someone bellow "hey honey, it's the NAKED COWBOY this is poifect" and then this enormous entourage assembles. here they are, groom yelling AYYYY, bride with sternly pursed lips. always wonder how they are now...
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holy moley. in melissa moore's talk, she said that
@moderna_tx
is doing 75L transcription reactions, and will make around 140Kg of RNA this year. wow...
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went downstairs to check on some of the stocks i brought home for safe keeping and OH MY WTF HAPPENED HERE?
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can i throw this out there: after 8 straight rejections, i finally got a new R01 funded today. was beginning to think it'd never happen again. many thanks to my lab and PO. woot!
also means we have another funded opportunity for an RNA biologist...
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I made it to L! if someone told this baby over the next 18263 days, he would meet so many incredible folks, see glorious things across the world, witness countless discoveries with brilliant scientists, and have an amazing family, that baby would have said "aagle-flagle mum-bum"!
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new lai lab paper! our newest work on alternative mRNA 3' ends (
#3UTRs
#APA
).
@seungjaylee
dissected cell-specific 3' programs across 0.5M cells/250 celltypes in the
@FlyCellAtlas
, the first cell-specific APA annotations in
#fly
and a big resource. 1/12🧵
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scientists have known for years that oncogenes are made of DNA, and did nothing about it. this week, i will introduce legislation to ban DNA once and for all. our citizens' health and well-being must come first!!!
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score progression on our meiotic drive grant:
2017: triaged
2020: 32%
2021: 11% (unfunded)
today: 1%
YAYYYYY!!!
thanks to my great lab, esp Jeffrey
@Anti_Sense
and Gillian Lin.
ps: we want YOU to join this project, amazing tools+data to decipher RNAi and selfish genes. DM me!
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new Lai lab paper! after being on biorxiv the past year, +4 rejections, we finally found a nice home for our study on repression of cryptic
#RNA
#splicing
at
@PLOSGenetics
. lone author paper from recent grad Brian Joseph, did everything start to finish! /1
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writing this as timestamp. i just heard an amazing result from my lab, the kind of thing where you suddenly know all at once there is a big story to come. don't have all the window dressing yet, but it will come. not all science is like this, but we live for these rare moments!
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starting day with a bummer, indeed bummed to hear our R01 was again declined by council, having scored 16%/15%/15% on last three tries (payline 14%). yes i know, just have to put back in like all other grants and papers, but the numbing inefficiency of the system is uh numbing...
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new lab preprint! amazing work by genetics master
@dgaraulet
who discovered a miRNA mutant that induces female virgins to behave as if already mated. he figured out CNS neurons affected, and CRISPRed the hell out of homothorax to show miRNA/APA regulation of 1 gene explains this!
miRNAs and neural alternative polyadenylation specify the virgin behavioral state
#biorxiv_neursci
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i started blowing glass again recently... here's a selection of new vases and experimenting with different color combos. thanks for checking them out!
#SciArt
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fabulous evening
#HarveySociety
with
@HarmitMalik
, here with laura johnston. huge privilege to help celebrate his science, mentorship, and generosity!
#GenomicConflict
#RedQueen
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really jazzed about our new paper out in
@CellReports
soon, esp as it has not one, but *two* high school students as co-authors!! i taught them my tricks on genome browsing, and they carefully inspected 1000 loci to define a new RNA class! (hint: related to miRNAs, but not).
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i was at a meet-n-greet with new grad students, and got asked how i'm liking school so far ... i said there's this Eric Lai lab that sounds super exciting...
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spring has sprung! i'm not always over to my in-laws during the handful of days of peak blossoms on their magnificent cherry tree, but we hit it today!
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i stand in solidarity with others who got ND today. but do you want to trade places with someone who got 11% on an A1 today, checked in with PO, and was immediately told, sorry there is no funding for this in FY2021. i really needed this after 0/6 R01 last year.
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hello
#RNAmods
#m6A
junkies who can't get enough and so you don't mind a weekend update...please check out our new story with
@adamcchang
and ralph kleiner labs on how neural- and mushroom body-autonomous roles of m6A/YTHDF control memory in flies! /1
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my 50th is a time of reflection. one fond thing, exactly 20 years ago (my 30th bday for those counting), was
@NatureGenet
publishing online my proposal that miRNAs identify targets via ~7nt complements to their 5' ends. i'm glad to say this finding has stood the test of time!
I made it to L! if someone told this baby over the next 18263 days, he would meet so many incredible folks, see glorious things across the world, witness countless discoveries with brilliant scientists, and have an amazing family, that baby would have said "aagle-flagle mum-bum"!
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new Lai lab paper: for splicing and APA aficionados, this study analyzes both! we show how multiple ELAV/Hu RBPs determine the landscape of neural splicing and distal last exon usage, the latter related to APA. we go from fly to mammals...
#PLOSGenetics
: /1
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check out these beauties: proofs for two upcoming lai lab papers! will happily sacrifice a couple weekend hours to check them. congrats to Jeffrey
@Anti_Sense
(he's on the job market, don't miss out!) and recent grad brian joseph on these great
#RNA
stories. tweetorials soon...
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in honor of
@PavelTomancak
50th, i want to remind people of his masterworks from the Rubin lab. some think it was the "in situ wall", used to organize the incredible systematic atlas of embryonic patterns of gene expression 1/2
@PavelTomancak
@mpicbg
pavel, after >20 years you definitely got younger!! that was the time of my life doing science with you, will never forget those berkeley days. cheers!
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i was just told about a result that finally nails something we've been wondering about in the lab for nearly a decade. sometimes puzzles are hard to crack, but this is the kind of day we live for. gonna be a good day!!
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yayyy! our work just graduated from
@biorxivpreprint
to
@CellReports
! A double negative post-transcriptional regulatory circuit underlies the virgin behavioral state
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good monday for the Lai lab ... two papers accepted! because science is more fun with friends, we are indebted to collaborations with
@JMTali
lab for one of them on splicing, and
@Denglab_Tulane
for other one on miRNA activities. will have more to say about these studies soon...
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sharing some fun news with the world: i think this is the first time ever that both me and my better half got grants on same day!! mine was a tiny one (every bit helps), but her's is a big one, and in the humanities to boot ... she's the rainmaker!!
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New Lai lab paper: A double-negative gene regulatory circuit underlies the virgin behavioral state. congrats
@DGaraulet
on a cool story connecting a miRNA, its major target (Hth), and a target of the target (Dsx), to control female reproductive behavior!
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ONE NIGHT ONLY - absolute thrill to rock with the extremely talented
#YukiTomari
and
@cecerelab
at
#Bellairs
RNA meeting!! we pulled together a set on 1hr rehearsal doing songs they never played before. we will do it again at a future
#RNA
meeting (hint hint, meeting organizers!)
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happy
#flyday
! wanted to share a stained glass mating pair as a present to myself to celebrate our recent study on this by
@DGaraulet
. based on iconic photo by
@AmyAdventure
and a tip by
@IdeaSpermatheca
. thanks rosie for dealing with my picky color selections.
@GeneticsGSA
Share your Drosophila-themed artwork on Twitter or Instagram using
#Dros21
and
#FruitFlyArt
before Nov 30 to be in the drawing for a free
#Dros21
registration! We're so psyched to see all of your creations!
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new Lai lab paper: A comprehensive in vivo screen for anti-apoptotic miRNAs. We used the Awesome Power of Fly Genetics to identify anti-apoptotic miRNAs. we found lots, and also find they can protect tumor suppressor clones. what are implications in human?
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what the what? the Lai lab is 15 years old!!! how did that happen? so humbled and proud of the amazing scientists i've had the privilege to work with these years. i never thought we would explore so many frontiers in regulatory biology, and there is so much still to discover!
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i made a useful observation today: my miserable short jogs are slightly more palatable if i divide them into two even shorter jogs, punctuated by ice cream in between! 🍦
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so much sadness, frustration, pain in the world right now. but please take a moment to shout-out fly genetics virtuoso
@dgaraulet
. after 6 years work, and endless blocking at 6 journals, we are overjoyed his
#miRNA
#APA
#behavior
masterpiece is out
@Dev_Cell
. more on this soon...
In
@Dev_Cell
, SKI scientists including Daniel Garaulet in the
@lucksmith
lab explain how a genetic switch in the brain controls female fruit flies' mating behavior.
See how this could help us understand neural diseases such as autism and schizophrenia.
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you guys. its now july and i still haven't had a haircut since LAST DECADE. pretty soon im a start looking like this guy again 👇
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woot woot! after 5 (&*%@#!) rejections throughout 2022 on an amazing paper (if my opinion counts), we finally got accepted on the 6th try. more to come, great to have this news on a beautiful spring day before the weekend...
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lai lab update: both papers we resubmitted last month (on miRNA and mRNA processing) were accepted yesterday! and, with a little push, two more masterworks on small RNA regulation and biology go out tomorrow!!
ps, we have positions available on these projects...pls contact me!
bam! the lai lab is on 🔥. it's not even noon and i've already resubmitted two amazing papers on miRNA processing and mRNA processing. taking the rest of the day off...
#RNA
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this is bonkers.
@DeepMind
#AlphaFold
basically got our unpublished structure right. how did it know?? however, it doesn't know what the nucleic acid ligand is, so good thing there is still a place for expts... 🙂
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i feel a little guilty stealing away after everyone's asleep to gaze at some sequences. but i just found a thing in the genome! many instances. often conserved across vertebrates. i think, maybe, no one noticed it before. nice feeling before going to bed.
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inspired by
@LiamHoltLab
and the InspireScience symposium, I started glassblowing again last month, after 17 year hiatus. just picked up some pieces I made
@UrbanGlass
, looking forward to making more in the new year. look for my Etsy shop in 2022!
#SciArt
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it has been a long couple years since i attended a meeting in person, and its just great seeing longtime colleagues and chatting with new people, so many ideas flying around. also, i still got it: 3 people have asked me whose lab i'm in.
#cshlsysbio
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is it ok to toot the horn of your amazing lab? we just got proofs for the 5th gem of a research paper this year. + 2 reviews and handful of collab papers, that's 10 for 2023 so far! and 3 more ms still winding their ways through the system. Lai lab is on 🔥🔥🔥they're the best!!!
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bit of personal history to share. lately i've been having a blast re-reading the "hitchhiker's guide" series with my daughter, and been meaning to locate my photos of when i met douglas adams to show her. found them! 30 yrs ago, 1992! 1/2
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not to brag, but how many of you got a cast iron fly trivet as a gift?!? someone knows me. 🪰
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so proud of new Lai lab work
@MolecularCell
! Renfu Shang continues our study of atypical miRNA biogenesis. non-canonical mir-451 still surprises us after 10 yrs, here teaching us about clusters. sadly they passed on my daughter's cover, what do you think?
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although
#cshlmRNA
is virtual, i'm still having lobsters on the last night! thanks
@YongshengShi
@TheTracyLab
@NeugebauerKarla
alberto kornblihtt for organizing a great meeting and all participants for teaching me so many things about
#RNA
!
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friday grant news, but not mine! amongst scientists, we often bemoan the thin funding rates we are confronted with. but believe me, it's worse in the humanities. so its extra incredible my better half just got the 👍on big NEH grant!! send virtual high-fives, i'll pass on to her!
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is there any sweeter email to receive than "We are pleased to provisionally accept your manuscript" on the very first fricken submission?!?!? i think the last time this happened was like 10 years ago. gooooo Lai lab especially
@Binglong15
!!
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thanks dr. mosca
@drosophilosophy
for hanging out this afternoon, including bonus fly-pushing tutorial for our daughter!
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things to start off a birthday right: pie, coffee, sunflowers and my wonderful girls!
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new music to start the week! i wrote an insider's tune on coronavirus transmission and global human RNA transfection. naturally, it's called "RNA - you get around". 2 versions here: slower acoustic and faster electric. lmk what you think and please RT!
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new Lai lab paper! congrats to Renfu Shang, Seungjae Lee
@seungjaylee
and Gayan Senavirathne on their
#miRNA
review in
@NatureRevGenet
! wait, are you thinking, who needs another miRNA review? well, we tried to something new and here's how... 1/
download:
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new Lai lab paper! in case you don't have other plans this weekend, and are interested in
#RNAi
,
#GenomicConflict
#MeioticDrive
, have a look at this crazy story from Jeffrey
@Anti_Sense
! 1/3
Endogenous RNAi silences a burgeoning sex chromosome arms race
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new lai lab paper! congrats
@Binglong15
on solving a 10 year odyssey on in vivo miRNA biology in the lab. while many miRNA-KOs have little phenotype and thus are proposed as "fine-tuning", wouldn't you rather study a KO with whoppers mutant defects?? 1/5
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new Lai lab paper! in this age of big/team science, can still have 1-author papers. Renfu Shang fully drove this study. its a followup on his discovery of regulated
#miRNA
biogenesis in clusters (PMID: 32302542), now systematic tests and some surprises!🧬
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happy friday! i'm happy to share news on POTUS, neural APA, and ELAV proteins!!! but let's focus on the latter. this has been a fascinating saga on neural gene regulation that an amazing succession of scientists in my group finally cracked. 🧵 1/n
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wow! (as in Toll!) wonderful personal history on Toll signaling told by Janni Nüsslein-Volhard, carried out in large part by our dearly departed colleague and
@sloan_kettering
DB chair Kathryn Anderson. required reading! /1
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going to ignore the current tornado weather and the dumpster fire of the past 18 months, and just celebrate the Lai lab IS NOW OLD ENOUGH TO DRIVE!! thanks all the amazing techs/students/PDs who joined me on the ride. we discovered so many unexpected things and much more to come!
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bon voyage Jeffrey Vedanayagam
@Anti_Sense
! this is from last hour in lab after 6 years
@MSKCancerCenter
, studying small RNAs and de novo genes in evolution, genomic conflict and disease, he is ready to set up shop at UT San Antonio. good luck jeffrey lab!
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yay!!!!! paper accepted right before the weekend. here is the "graphical abstract" by my daughter. some of you saw me speak about this before, for others, updates soon!
#RNAgirls
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new Lai lab paper! Brian Joseph's "trilogy" on recursive and cryptic splicing in flies:
@NatureSMB
2018,
@PLOSGenetics
2021 and now today in
@LSAjournal
. he used the awesome power of flies to study three strategies that influence mRNA processing at recursive splice sites. /1
Brian Joseph, collaborators, and
@lucksmith
use Drosophila genetics and molecular assays to define 3 mechanisms that regulate mRNA processing outcomes at recursive splice sites.
@MSKEducation
@GSKGradSchool
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yes its true, fundamental
#RNA
research can save the world!! congrats to pioneers katalin and drew for uncovering how
#RNAmods
help synthetic mRNA evade the immune system, key to covid vaccine and other mRNA therapies.
BREAKING NEWS
The 2023
#NobelPrize
in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
4K
28K
79K
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just got my
@radiotopia
challenge coin! love the heft. thanks for hours of earworms
@99piorg
@romanmars
@kitchensisters
@RadioDiaries
@SongExploder
@thememorypalace
@TrumpConLaw
and more...
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there is a rumor i'm playing a little set on the upper east side this evening...the rumor seems to be true! if i'm feeling it, i will do a world premiere of a song! DM for location.🎸🎶
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oh boy oh boy oh boy, new confocal! so long SP5, you done us proud over 47 microscopy papers, but you're no good dead and unrepairable. looking forward to imaging with new instrument. thank you
@MSKCancerCenter
for supporting our research!
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bedtime conversation:
F1: dad, why do you sometimes write mi-tosis, but other times you write it my-osis?
me: well, they're actually different things.
F1: really?!?
and that's how we got on to learning about modes of cell division before bedtime story*.
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starting off the year right ... first accepted paper of 2023!! at this rate we project to publish 104 more papers this year, let's gooooooooooo
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Scientists of Twitter! The world needs more reminders that we're living, breathing human beings. Quote tweet this with a picture of you doing not-science.
Scientists of Twitter! The world needs more reminders that we're living, breathing human beings. Quote tweet this with a picture of you doing not-science 🤓
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i had fun talking to
@MSKCancerCenter
news team for a new series on life "beyond the bench". of course, science is a core part of my identity, but so are music, arts, and noticing all the overlooked details of the city and world. and everything connects!!
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new Lai lab (and former Lai lab) paper! discovery of new
#BEN
domain proteins using
#Alphafold
. i am so excited for this one, it truly synthesizes 30+ years of my career and happy to be part of it, led by our former postdoc Yang Yu in his own lab!! 1/8 🧵
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watching muppet show with family tonight. had to interrupt proceedings to explain that the "Koozebanians" were the inspiration for the fly gene "kuzbanian" (kuz), a core component in the Notch pathway. bc the tufty head of the male looks like the bristle tufts in kuz clones ...
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bam! the lai lab is on 🔥. it's not even noon and i've already resubmitted two amazing papers on miRNA processing and mRNA processing. taking the rest of the day off...
#RNA
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thrilled, excited, grateful:
@ChanZuckerberg
support for new collaboration b/w
@nevillesanjana
and us, to probe mysteries of neuronal isoforms. we hope to recruit a joint scientist to bridge powerful screening platforms in Sanjana lab with RNA regulation in Lai lab. DM/RT tx!
@NYGenome
and Sloan Kettering Institute researchers awarded
@ChanZuckerberg
grant to collaborate on the study of diverse neuron gene elements in neurodegeneration. Read more on the work of Dr. Sanjana (
@nevillesanjana
) and Dr. Lai (
@lucksmith
) below:
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incredible resource of fly genomes by
@Bernard_Y_Kim
@PetrovADmitri
: ~200 species +100 in 2021. as someone who spent a lot of phd sequencing bits of fly genomes from phage libraries, and pd in Rubin lab who sequenced 1st Dmel genome, this is insane! 🪰
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last gig of the year. capping off a great dual RNA meeting
@KeystoneSymp
in Banff, i had a blast playing with the incomparable yuki tomari! and thanks to all the meeting participants who sang along! 🎶🧬
#KSRNAMod24
#KSRegRNA24
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i set a meeting tomorrow at 2:22, 2/2/22. just for the hell of it.
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good times
@UofUBiology
, chatting flies, chromosome manipulations, neurons, and genomic conflict with aylin rodan, adrian rothenfluh,
@Nitin_Phadnis
,
@ClementYChow
,
@sophiejccaron
, kent golic and
@JasonSynaptic
. bonus: fulfilled a childhood dream to visit
#BonnevilleSaltFlats
!🧂
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new Lai lab paper! neurons have the most complex alternative transcriptomes of all celltypes. how does it work? and does it matter?? we try to review all the latest in neural alternative splicing and 3'UTRs, from mechanisms to biology. congrats
@seungjaylee
! read it
@LSAjournal
.
@lucksmith
@seungjaylee
provide an integrated perspective on mechanisms of neural-specific mRNA processing strategies (alternative splicing and alternative 3'UTRs) and their biological requirements for neural development and function
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wanted to re-up a favorite seq control. to find trans-spliced mRNAs,
@GraveleyLab
sequenced from interspecies hybrid flies. BUT as control, they mixed RNA of the two flies in a tube and made libs. turns out you still get many "interspecies chimera"! some good ones though...
Regarding the preprint about integration of SARS-CoV-2 into the human genome. Main evidence is chimeric human/SARS-CoV-2 transcripts. 10 years ago my lab published a paper demonstrating that chimeric reads in NGS expts are artifacts. Assume same here 1/
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new Lai lab paper! are you curious about regulation of miRNA processing? check out new study on surprising strategy that mir-144, the partner of Dicer-ind mir-451, is made as a suboptimal hairpin and needs RBP help to reshape as a good Dicer substrate! 1/3
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30 years ago this week, i fulfilled my dream of living on the west coast, and began grad school
@UCSanDiego
. at the time, i didn't know anyone there. but i made great friends, played music, blew glass, and most importantly, figured out what i wanted to study the rest of my life!
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when i was a wee lad growing up in Montana, all we to play with were cups. but we wuz happy.
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51 years old today and i finally got a flaming elmo from
@MadS100tist
!! all is good with the world...
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holy moley look at this table! lobster night fun at
#cshlregRNA
with co-organizers nick proudfoot+
@ESontheimerLab
,
@mcjunkin_lab
, jorgen kjems, samer hussein,
@NCISandraWolin
,
@JeremyWilusz
,
@VidigalJoana
,
@MartinjSimard
,
@Mendell_lab
,
@leemorj
, awesome
#RNA
community in person!
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new music about the coronavirus was debuted.
@ianholmes
@chrmosimann
@TheLovelyLab
@DaphSci
@jhspedals
@ThorpyFx
@wbderry
@slewzeus
@fspasqualini
@benoitbruneau
@intheOR
hey fellas! im playing a secret micro gig tomorrow, will premiere a new song. wish me luck! will report back later and post 🎵🎸
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interesting! melissa said they've now engineered T7 RNAP that doesn't make the trace amount of dsRNA. but then if people used that early on, would we know about RNAi??
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@HarmitMalik
pro tip: once upon a time, years back, i cleaned my office. was so proud of myself i took a picture. started using it as my zoom background since pandemic, my office is magically always tidy.
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