immunology & stem cell biology- currently solid tumor oncology @rockefelleruniv 🇺🇸🇮🇪🇫🇮 citizen- reading, running, climbing, folk harp etc
NYC
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has there ever been a problem in science where the solution hasn't been "it's far more nuanced, complex, & context dependent than we thought"
just once it would be nice for overwhelming complexity to suddenly simplify itself with additional understanding from a new discovery
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we don't talk enough about how insane it is that beethoven was so neurotic and ill that he left behind locks of his hair and demanded! to be studied! in the 1820s before we even knew about viruses or genetics and then 200 years later WE DID IT
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it's a well-kept secret but the actual reason people get married & make fewer friends in their late 20s and early 30s because a decade of adulthood is the point where the overall narrative gets too convoluted to explain to new people
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still really love this paper even though it's been two years
cell.com/current-biology/ful…
tl/dr: weird iron & lipid & liver genetics, hep b, drinking
he also scored terribly on polygenic indices for musical ability
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what are examples of eerie unexpected heritability in your life if you're privileged enough to have a good relationship with your family
mine was finding out my dad and I ate the exact same thing during undergrad all nighters without ever discussing it & they're v odd choices
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also if you ever need a paper behind a paywall that's not on scihub- dm me- I have journal access, a family of NAS professors who raised me to hate elsevier, & a friend circle of researchers who all support open science- am more than happy to be captain hook the science pirate
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did y'all know NASA was legitimately worried that the moon wasn't going to have a hard surface to land on and decided to just go for it due to the similarities between observed topography and the valles caldera
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are c-sections unnatural or is it actually really cool that our species came up with a solution for our big heads using our big heads
(can already feel the maternal microbiome ppl coming for me w/pitchforks)
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we are no longer making fun of how buyable/cheap Forbes 30u30 is after finding out it's mainly for o1 visas
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"We have learned that many things are lost if one looks at averages, but are revealed when one studies single events"
A lot of Bayes-obsessed ppl I know would be angered by this but it's from a biologist who successfully cured his own daughters rare cancer in a relative rush
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ever since I learned sharks are older than the north star, I've been trying to figure out exactly when in earth's history the north star appeared in our sky with no avail just to see if it coincided with anything cool in evolution
this is 300% not scientific, I just want to know
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I do not for a second expect that that is actually all that heritable I just want people's creepy coincidence stories
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how wild is it that so much of our biochemistry fluctuates with the seasons which we only have due to a giant rock slamming into us billions of years ago to create the moon
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I still can't believe we don't teach biology primarily as history- like my brain kind of broke when I realized HMGB1 is something we have from when we were archaea
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one time I took 25mgs of zinc for a month just to prove to my GP that iron and zinc do in fact share the exact same absorption & storage pathways and it's kind of insane to see all the anti-iron rhetoric right now in the public without mention of this
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expected 0 answers & unintentionally got a comment section full of uplifting ones that give hope
I feel like the discovery of AIRE too would also qualify
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not enough people appreciate that their skin and brain are derived from the same developmental layer
neuroectoderm
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I was in fact 4' 11" back then and I moved about the country with all of my belongings in just that backpack
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in the UK when a wealthy woman schedules an elective c-section ahead of time it's called "too posh to push"
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hi it's me
nitter.app/ruthhook_/status/16051…
tl/dr: company was selling cells as induced pluripotent stem cells (reprogrammed somatic cell) when in reality they had a contamination and were selling embryonic stem cells
the ncardia cell contamination scandal-
so CDI (in the v red until fujifilm bought) sells a product called iCells cardiomyocytes that are iPSCs diffed into CMs and sold at a super high price and theoretically you can use them to make cardiac constructs (1/n)
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as the child of a greencard marriage, I support all paths but mainly the most efficient ones
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I've heard colloquially that there's something in development that can turn on that makes the likelihood of being L vs R handed 50/50 and I know nothing else
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oh that candidate gene study failed to replicate
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3613…
anecdotally I'm homozygous for the "short sleep" version of dec2/rs121912617 and usually fully need an 8 hours
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oh crucial context being I'm a c282y hfe homozygote and my ferritin and TF% shot back up
anyway biochemists who name proteins after specific metals when they really aren't selective sort of nerf a lot of fields
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interesting- someone else mentioned cucumber and I think they're both high in l-citrulline
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I have so much more like 7/10 lung cancer cell lines have iron regulation mutations, K562s express embryonic zeta globin, people using bone marrow cancer lines KNOWN for donating mitochondria reparatively as cardiac fibroblasts, and using HeLa cells in a paper = astrology
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the ncardia cell contamination scandal-
so CDI (in the v red until fujifilm bought) sells a product called iCells cardiomyocytes that are iPSCs diffed into CMs and sold at a super high price and theoretically you can use them to make cardiac constructs (1/n)
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[2024] I've hated science since being taught introns are junk DNA, viruses aren't alive, and western blots are considered quantitative
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maybe I've been reading too many IL-17 papers but what if we just stopped using anti/pro inflammatory as descriptors for cytokines
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super dumb question but what happens to the discarded nucleus during red blood cell formation/enucleation
like I presume it's just eaten by some neutrophils or something- I don't know, I should know this
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none of this was related to contamination which also runs amok because EVERYONE SHOULD BE DOING CONFIRMATORY SEQUENCING ALWAYS
denovo.substack.com/p/stem-c…
Merrick is great and you should all subscribe to his substack
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I'm sorry but there is nothing as good as path twitter
bored on a first date? path twitter
preparing for parenthood? path twitter
bored waiting to finish staining? path twitter
shutting down the cytometer? path twitter
etc
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if they're an actually interested trainee they'll see this and know
there's so many great candidates out there I would move on but my mother's foreign postdocs have been using chatgpt to basically bandaid their difficulties with English as a 2nd/3rd language & that would be my kindest interpretation
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Did you know that it's due to a horizontal gene transfer event from arthropods from the Carboniferous?
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article…
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I was hoping to reach some of the crazy ecology professors on here who could give some fringe side cases and then say no
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does anyone know what type of eagle/falcon this is! pictured at breakneck ridge this weekend in NY
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do you consider dolphins and whales to be different species and do you consider lions and tigers to be different species
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7%
yes/no
2%
no/yes
7%
no/no
1,099 votes • Final results
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Everyone knows but dinoflagellates and histones/nucleosomes!
nature.com/articles/s41598-0…
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side note fun fact
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article…
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dm'd to me half an hour ago
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article…
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fun fact: a human specific gene duplication of SRGAP2A allows antagonism of the original which promotes spine maturation & this allows human pyramidal neurons to have increased spine density, radial migration, & allows emergence of the our neocortex
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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does anyone know what SPECIFIC species of worm thrives in the layer of fat & rotting material in bubbly creek in chicago/the remnants of the stockyards of upton sinclairs jungle
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fun fact: you have a self-cleaving ribozyme in your genome that determines episodic memory
academic.oup.com/mbe/article…
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tl/dr: these were CMs diffed from Rues2 ESCs not iPSCs
moral: sequence everything always, store your cells in the vapor phase w/internally threaded cryovials, label
(9/n last)
Cor.4U® - fully functional hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes. Here you can see them beating on a patterned substrate, with visible sarcomeres & mitochondria.
View full video at: lnkd.in/dhtG7Av
#Cor4U #cardiomyocytes #safetypharmacology #ncardia #video
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credit to @a_manifolder for giving this to me weeks ago which if you know me irl you know I annoyingly never stop talking about MOR in immunology & neurodevelopment
jneurosci.org/content/41/6/1…
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biotech is super bad right now!!! xbi is low, everyone is getting laid off, private capital investment is low, people are realizing the basic research gaps holding back any downstream technology development & wanting to work on them
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EVs to you mean:
17%
extracellular vesicles
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electric vehicles
309 votes • Final results
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what running shoes should I get myself for my birthday
current ones look like Muppets characters/are at the end of their life
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/test drugs which I did and they're industry standard - however a lab in germany ran scRNAseq and found them all to be transcriptionally homogenous with fibroblast markers instead of any atrial vs ventricular markers (2/n)
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
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it's how we figured out rhabdo!!! and they hid in the subways during the blitz
we figured out celiac around the same time from war famine in the netherlands
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TYPE THREE DIABETES IS ALREADY A THING sorry for the all caps but they're needed
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type…
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follow up: were you aware that the offspring for these pairings (whales & dolphins and lions & tigers) are fertile
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618 votes • Final results
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Anyway, iCells are stupid expensive & you have to preplate because the initial die off is unacceptably variable & it's all around a scam- just diff your own CMs (Wu lab protocols). nCardia wanted to break up this monopoly and started selling a line of iPSC-CMs called Cor.4U (3/n)
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around 2017? Anyway, not to start a DFW footnote but in the US there's v strict regulations on use of ESCs vs iPSCs and you have to fill out infinite paperwork for the former & you couldn't get federal $ during the Bush admin (thx obama but actually) & the latter is chill (4/n)
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Scientists starting using Cor.4U in cardiac stem cell papers as iPSC-CMs until one day in 2021 someone decided to do confirmatory sequencing on the cells (I actually don't know who did this, if you do lmk)... (5/n)
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this was a paper I read before I realized I needed an intervention to stop reading frontiers papers and medical theories
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
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I feel like I didn't truly appreciate that in middle school when we read it for english
gerda weissmann klein's all but my life left a much bigger impression on me/still influences my consistent practical footwear choices
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clone, transform dh5alpha magic cells from zymo, confirm sequence, inoculate a mega culture or just a buncho 4 mL cultures, maxiprep with thermo genejet- it's as good as macharey nagel for getting LPS & endotoxins out for downstream txns for making virus
so like 2 days and a talented undergrad or you can pay someone a bunch of money
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how frequently do you think about endoplasmic reticulum stress response
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weekly
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123 votes • Final results
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Do you subscribe to determinism and have you worked with RNA?
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When the confirmatory sequecing was done on the iPSC-CMs from nCardia (Cor.4U) - it turned out instead of iPSCs they were actually RUES2 ESCs that had been diffed into CMs and major contamination had happened at some point- instead of iPSCs, everyone was actually using ESCs (7/n)
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did you know they inherit their mitochondria from both their mother & father and it's used in their sex determination
wait you probably definitely know that
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And it was a scandal and nCardia obviously stopped selling them and any paper that used Cor.4U CMs had to issue corrections/errata clarifying that they were actually RUES2 CMs (8/n)
eg:
nature.com/articles/s41598-0…
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article…
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love this gradiant of disparity from before and after birth with NPCs being relatively the same to hepatocytes being the most changed
We speculate that these rapid, cell type-restricted changes are poised physiological adapations that are triggered by birth, e.g. gluoconeogenesis in the liver (cut off from mom), thermogenesis by fat (the real world is cold), etc. 14/n
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And tangentially mistletoe is missing complex I - pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2973…
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deep brain photoreceptors!
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3287…
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