How do cells efficiently respond to stress? Transcriptional stress responses are well-known—and in our latest study, we discover that cells use biomolecular condensation to redirect translation from old to new mRNAs 1/n
A first in 15 years: every member of the lab is currently funded by a fellowship or prize they've competed for and won. On top of doing great science, they've rallied to critique each others' proposals, practice talks, share lessons learned. Super-proud.
Associate professor as of today. Such a strange naming scheme. Who are we associated with? Who do assistant professors assist? And what, exactly, are full professors full of?
Unsolicited advice: the idea that you are *almost done* with this experiment/paper/project will cause you huge amounts of misery that is almost unparalleled in its senselessness. You can let go of this belief, and little will change except your day-to-day happiness.
“Mother/Daughter,” 2018. Bronze, silver, 3D printed steel, apatite. The jewels get their color from phosphorus, which links each base of DNA. Depicting late anaphase in budding yeast, where — unlike in our cells — the nuclear membrane remains intact. A piece from my debut show.
This bizarre belief that establishing causality requires uncovering the mechanism is one of the most progress-inhibiting misconceptions in science. Establishing causality requires only controlled perturbations — you need not know anything about mechanism. +1
@kph3k
A massive and fun biological puzzle, still unsolved: Why are there so few marine insects 🪰, and so few terrestrial crustaceans 🦀?
Insects likely evolved from crustaceans; they're all arthropods. Both have coexisted for hundreds of millions of years. 1/4
A drift of population geneticists
A digest of molecular biologists
A loop of crystallographers
A convergence of evolutionary biologists
An assumption of biophysicists
(To all my colleagues: I love you)
Our review of stress granules and related phenomena is out
@MolecularCell
! An unusually pointed piece, aimed at stimulating progress in a mature field where many of the most basic questions remain unanswered. Like: what do stress granules do? 1/5
Hot off the presses...our coolest study ever...seriously! By comparing a thermophile, mesophile, and cryophile, we show conservation and ecological tuning of heat-triggered biomolecular condensation from the ecological to submolecular scales 🔥🔬❄️ (🧵)
Thrilled to share our latest on
@biorxivpreprint
: major work by grad student
@whoisyoo
about what molecular chaperones are really good at. It turns out they *love* to disperse stress-induced biomolecular condensates. Often speculated; now demonstrated. 🧵
Proud and terrified to announce: My debut solo sculpture show, “Curiosity,” opens at Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle on Friday, December 7th. I’ll be there opening night.
@roqlarue
1/3
Gave a talk today and was reminded: after all these years, I still have profound stage fright. Can't catch my breath, heart racing, for the whole talk. It's physical. Has nothing to do with mechanics, or command, or comfort. Hopefully few noticed...but I did. Just like always.
Art by scientists by request: Hand-finished bronze white-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata) pendant, nestled in its microecology for safe traveling. Plus a silver version. Everything designed and finished by me, mix of old-school and new-school methods. 🦋
1/2 Art by scientists! So much great work out there. Let’s see what you’ve all been working on. RT with your work so we can organize a gallery poster session...
Out today in
@MolecularCell
! "Chaperones directly and efficiently disperse stress-triggered biomolecular condensates."
Simple message resulting from the herculean effort of
@whoisyoo
with assists from
@JAM_Bard
and Evgeny Pilipenko. Enjoy!
Take a moment to read Harmit Malik's story. He's one of the truly good ones, and the way he talks about the origins and development of ideas, professional development and mentorship, the future of basic science, and fridge magnets deserves your attention.
Yesterday marked 15 years of the Drummond Lab and a decade
@uchicago
. The group went all-out and threw an amazing party. Plenty of sweetness, teasing, blasts from the past, and general nerd joy. It's the people, people. ❤️🔬❤️
First graduate student
@KSamerotte
accepted a faculty position. I remember the day she approached me when I was still a grad student, saying she’d like to work together when I started my lab. What a delightful, long-awaited, well-deserved, promise-filled turn of the world.
Why shouldn't you try to help by pivoting your research to COVID-19? Because your pivot has current costs which almost certainly outweigh its future benefits. A brief thread with some perspective (my own perspective as a scientist) on
@Y_Gilad
's important request. 1/
I know it's hard. You want to do something useful. It's an honest desire to help. But you can't help. Stop asking trainees to come to lab to work on your new brilliant idea of how to save humanity. Let the experts do their work. Stop 'pivoting' your research to COVID-19. Please.
Faculty job interview horror stories aside, a friend & mentor told me at the time I was applying, "Enjoy it. It's the last time everyone you meet will be totally excited to hear you talk about what you're working on." Dead on.
Our latest: "Transient intracellular acidification regulates the core transcriptional heat shock response," overwhelmingly the work of the brilliant
@ugcgccacc
.
More tweets when it's formatted. But already online hours after acceptance (thanks
@eLife
!)
First keynote in the books. Honored to do it for the conference and community that has supported me and my group since my first year as an assistant prof 11 years ago: the 28th Annual Midwest Stress meeting at
@NorthwesternU
Congratulations to Dr. Haneul Yoo
@whoisyoo
on her doctorate, on winning program distinction in biochemistry and molecular biophysics
@UChicagoBMB
…and on the award for Best Dissertation in the Biological Sciences Division
@UChicago
! 🤓🏆
Please,
@nytimes
, if you want to help public understanding, please don't run an article on an alarmingly infectious fungus with a video called "Revenge of the Bacteria." Fungi are more like us than bacteria. The difference is important for helping everyone understand antibiotics.
Still in disbelief. Sliman absorbed life and spread love so purely and intensely…so many nights of jazz, science, debates, venting, drinks, and full-body hugs where you felt he was hugging your soul. And he was. My lost brother... 💔
PS: Here's a direct (detail-redacted) quote from a senior sci/editor on a study where we did controlled perturbations. "The mechanism by which [X] regulates [Y] is unclear. Without further analysis the results are essentially correlative." This is *actual nonsense*. Not uncommon.
And this curious beauty: a young female Salticus scenicus, the zebra jumping spider who keeps my windowsill fly-free, in bronze and black glass, with every petal of her plumage placed separately. This is the look they give you — their vision is astonishing.
We establish causality through controlled perturbations. Mechanism is the "how," not the "whether". Read a bit of
@yudapearl
if you want a respectable introduction to causality. For now, stop causing me to lose my mind (by unknown mechanisms) by mistaking causality and mechanism.
Excited to announce that we've posted a new preprint on
@biorxiv
by grad student
@ugcgccacc
(yes, she actually is going to make you translate that) where we report her remarkable discoveries about cells, heat stress, and intracellular pH. (1/6)
Congratulations to
@ugcgccacc
who successfully defended her Ph.D. today! Mind-altering work presented with extreme clarity, centered around her discovery that the heat shock response regulated by Hsf1 has an activation pathway dependent on intracellular pH. 1/4
Took an 85% pay cut to leave industry and start as a 1st year PhD student. 20 years later, as a tenured prof, I still don’t make the $ I made then (without adjusting for inflation!). Worth it. Life-defining move for me. YMMV.
"Should I do a post-doc after my PhD or go right into industry? I want to see if I can get an academic job."
I grappled with this same question three years ago. Instead, I wish I would have asked myself this:
"Would I pay $120,000 for the *chance* at an academic job?" 1/
For the curious: here’s our published contribution to undoing these scams (we urge nuance in conclusion), and also see work of
@slavov_n
(plus too many others to mention).
First day of 2020 (happy new year, everyone!), first day of first sabbatical in 13 years as PI. Here at
@uchicago
it's not automatic -- instead, many convos with trusted friends led to the request. More to share; that's one of my goals for this stretch.
Come be my colleague
@uchicago
! We're searching broadly for junior faculty to join us in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. The broad search is serious: we want great minds, first and foremost. I'm excited to see what you all are up to...
You created an incredible thing
@OdedRechavi
— kudos. Will treasure this experience watching a community find itself, learn about itself, and spread the love. You made it happen! Thank you ❤️
#physiologicalirrelevantconference
@christlet
@inkscape
We make all our publication figures in
@inkscape
and have for years...no particular resources to share, I learned organically and use essentially the vanilla package, so chiming in mostly to say it's possible (and enjoyable) to do.
“Huntress,” 2018, bronze and neodymium. The mantis Tenodera sinensis, with articulated raptorial hooks and shoulders, and her head mounted on magnets. 23 cm long.
You know, was working HR job with software company in TX, kept spending spare cash on textbooks, after a few years explored possibility (with professionals) that I’d lost my mind, quit job, started grad school at 29, and here we are.
I am so bored of reading about biologists' childhoods (or let's be honest, boyhoods) spent running around the countryside collecting insects. Like that's nice and all, but some of us grew up in cities. Can we get some alternative biologist origin stories?
“Ahhhhh...so much better. You wouldn’t believe how stuffy it is in that thing.” (After capturing this, we put him back outside to dry and start his brief singing career.) Neotibicen sp.
#cicada
.
How do cells efficiently respond to stress? Transcriptional stress responses are well-known—and in our latest study, we discover that cells use biomolecular condensation to redirect translation from old to new mRNAs 1/n
Congratulations to Rosalind Pan, our group’s superstar undergrad, who graduated this morning
@UChicago
summa cum laude and shortly starts her next chapter—grad student
@Caltech
! ⭐️🥹
Congratulations to our newly minted Dr. Yoo! 😎
@whoisyoo
delivered a tremendous public defense today ("Chaperones remodel stress-induced biomolecular condensates"), a crystal-clear tour of her research for a planet-wide audience. 1/4
Must say we've been beating this drum (IDRs are often neither necessary nor sufficient for condensation) for quite some time. It was never a sensible principle; it was more like something people hoped for. Zombie dogma. See
It almost becomes a dogma that intrinsic disordered region(IDR) drives biomolecular condensate formation likely through phase-separation. A new study challenges this tenet showing that IDR is dispensable for condensates but DNA binding is the culprit.
I still cherish two rather abrupt dressings-down I got from two different mentors. These were not pleasant in the moment. But I trusted them, they knew what they were doing, and they were right. They put my long-term success over my short-term comfort. *Trust* was crucial.
People, reach out to the folks you admire and ask if they will Zoom with you *right now*.
@PracheeAC
agreed, and we had a spectacular, wide-ranging chat that can only be had with someone who's "been there." Super-meaningful. 🥃✨🥃
Absolutely lovely cocktail zoom with
@dallandrummond
to replace the derailed in-person drink we were supposed to have almost a year ago! Until next time!🍷
Here's a bit from page 2 of an introductory book I thought might help me get up to speed on something. This is apparently annoyingly trivial if you have the proper training.
I apparently made some incorrect life choices, and will now suffer for that. (+1 job specialization.)
We study the cellular response to heat shock. It was discovered in the 60s and the mechanism behind the response remains unclear. Even the mechanism by which yeast -- single cells! -- sense heat is not yet known. But we know that heat causes the heat shock response.
“Curiosity” opens Friday 12/7 6-9 pm in Seattle at Roq La Rue Gallery, 705 E Pike St. I’ll be there — come say hi and see my work at the interface of art, science, and the natural world.
Absolutely fantastic news --
@HarmitMalik
has been a kind of guardian angel since the beginning of my career, and I expect our nation will profit from his guidance much as as I have.
Gave a talk today and my (lovely) host said that his student was now a postdoc in the lab of my first graduate student.
This is a) wonderful, and b) terrifying evidence consistent with being old. When did this happen?
Video of my talk "Rethinking the cellular heat shock response" for Cellular & Protein Homeostasis series here:
35 min talk, 45 mins of Q&A! Thanks to organizers
@PaoloDeLosRios
@NadinathN
@goloubinofflab
, A+ audience, and
@whoisyoo
for her discoveries.
My debut show opening is 6-9pm this Friday 12/7 at Roq La Rue Gallery (705 E. Pike St.) in Seattle—I’ll be there! Quite excited to show y’all what I’ve been up to. As a teaser, here is a tiny piece of a piece: half of a mitotic spindle pulling on chromosomes.