I hope all of us get to migrate away from this hell site as soon as possible. Something that helped me quite a bit was using the "Sky Follower Bridge" addon to find all the people I follow on here on BlueSky. Place seems pretty populated :)
I finally took the first step to leave this site! Let’s build a better science community at 🦋
Anyone excited about #RNA, #viruses and building a more supportive environment in academia, please find me there (same handle). See you on the other side.
Has anyone compiled a list of all the organ systems we have evidence that COVID damages?
I’m essentially looking for something to give my (evidence curious) friends to tell them why it’s SO crucial to avoid getting COVID.
Mit dem heutigen Tag endet meine Tätigkeit als Bundesministerin für Bildung und Forschung. Die Arbeit war fordernd, aber auch zutiefst erfüllend. Ich empfinde es als große Ehre und Privileg, dass ich dieses besondere Amt nahezu drei Jahre lang ausüben durfte.
We are proud to see the immense success German teams had this year🏆. This again proves how #SynBio is at the heart of Germany's #NextGen academics and entrepreneurs📈.
To celebrate, we have compiled the achievements of this years #iGEMGermany!🎉
First a digitized scent.
Then, a paper in Nature shows how odorant receptors can be engineered to figure out how slightly different structures can recognize very distinct molecules.
This is the start of something big. I can...smell it.
A couple years ago, I wrote that plant synthetic biology is ~15 years behind microbial efforts. But now, the gap seems to be closing.
For a new paper, researchers used integrases to record gene expression events in Arabidopsis, with single-cell resolution, to study how these plants develop from seed to maturity.
This isn't the first paper to report a "memory switch" for plants (that happened back in 2020), but this paper does take it quite a bit further.
The authors use two different integrases to track two different genes involved in lateral root development, called AHP6 and GATA23. The integrases enable them to figure out which gene turns on FIRST, and in which cells. They also did a similar experiment to study stomatal development.
The integrases can trigger four different states: In state 0, cells express a blue fluorescent protein; this indicates that neither of the genes have yet been expressed.
Now, if gene #1 is activated, one of the integrases switches on and makes the cells glow red. If the second gene is activated AFTER this event, then the second integrase also switches on and the cells glow green.
If gene #2 is expressed before gene #1, however, the integrase instead makes an excision in the genome and the cells don't glow at all.
By looking at how various cells in the plant glow, in different colors, scientists are able to figure out which genes are turned on which order. Cool stuff. I'm sure this can be scaled up, and more integrases can be added, to study even more genes in parallel.