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Bence Kövér

@bencekover.bsky.social
50 followers 145 following 44 posts

PhD student at King’s College London @pituitarylab.bsky.social Previously at UCL (2019-23) working on multicellularity in fission yeast, and exchange student at Caltech (2021-22)

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Reposted by Bence Kövér
Will Ratcliff @wcratcliff.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Out today in @nature.com: our review on how single cells evolve into multicellular organisms. With Ozan Bozdag, @kaitong25.bsky.social, Peter Yunker, and @matthewherron.bsky.social. rdcu.be/9ZuiKow9twKa For an overview, check out the video below.
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Reposted by Bence Kövér
bioRxivpreprint @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Single-Cell Study Designs Are Systematically Underpowered for Small-Effect Genes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Many thanks to the @wellcometrust.bsky.social for funding my PhD work and conference attendance. @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social @ccrb27.bsky.social @eyrc.bsky.social
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I also presented a poster on some recent results from our Pituitary Neuroendocrine Tumour Atlas with Ian Kruk, @jameskcl.bsky.social and Cynthia Andoniadou (@pituitarylab.bsky.social ). I was very happy to have some thoughtful discussions with leading experts in the field.
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The ENEA - European Neuroendocrine Association 2026 meeting in Paris just wrapped up. It was a great honour to see our previous work on the Consensus Pituitary Atlas (and epitome-atlas platform) highlighted in multiple talks, including the “Meet the expert” and “Year in Neuroendocrinology” sessions.
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
It has been really cool to see that many labs around the world are now using this resource in their daily work, conference presentations, posters and papers. We hope that all of this new data will further facilitate progress in the field. 5/5
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Briefly, all of the additional data further strengthens the original conclusions from the atlas (wrt. marker genes, male-female differences etc.). Also all datasets and integrated objects are now available in an updated format, with cleaner metadata to facilitate easier re-use. 4/5
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I wrote up a short blog post with some of the updates (something which I’ll aim to do with each new release).  bencekover.com/2026/08/24/w... 3/5
bencekover.com
What’s new in epitome v_0.03? – a (not-so) technical report
Image: Exponential adoption of single-cell profiling in the pituitary gland. There isn’t really a proper venue for writing brief updates to existing scientific projects. Publications typicall…
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
We have now updated the resource to include ~360 mice and ~1.42M cells. All of these datasets were automatically annotated for cell types using our previously developed Cell Type model. 2/5
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
In June, we published the largest resource on gene activity at the single-cell level in mouse pituitary glands, totalling 283 mice and ~1.3M cells.  www.cell.com/cell-reports... The atlas is browsable at epitome-atlas.com 1/5
cell.com
Consensus Pituitary Atlas, a scalable resource for annotation, novel marker discovery, and analyses in mouse pituitary gland research
Single-cell studies of the pituitary gland have been limited by small datasets and inconsistent analyses. Kövér and colleagues integrate 283 datasets (∼1.3 million cells) to build the Consensus Pituit...
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Wow, such a cool paper. I guess there might come a time when we can reconstruct the entirety of embryonic development.
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Really cool to have our lab featured by @plasmidsaurus.bsky.social . It’s been a massive boost in productivity to use their rapid bulk RNA-seq and whole plasmid sequencing services.
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Very cool! So much left to discover in pre-eukaryotic life
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Happy to see our new review paper led by @jameskcl.bsky.social . We discuss evidence on the role of stem cells in pituitary tumours. Furthermore, we discuss practical criteria for identifying stem cells, and develop a framework for their possible contributions to tumours. @pituitarylab.bsky.social
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Cell Reports @cp-cellreports.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Consensus Pituitary Atlas, a scalable resource for annotation, novel marker discovery, and analyses in mouse pituitary gland research
dlvr.it
Consensus Pituitary Atlas, a scalable resource for annotation, novel marker discovery, and analyses in mouse pituitary gland research
Single-cell studies of the pituitary gland have been limited by small datasets and inconsistent analyses. Kövér and colleagues integrate 283 datasets (∼1.3 million cells) to build the Consensus Pituitary Atlas, which enables robust marker discovery, automated cell annotation with machine learning, and accessible analysis through the epitome platform.
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Reposted by Bence Kövér
Reese Richardson @reeserichardson.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...
reeserichardson.blog
How much of Thermo Fisher’s antibody data has been manipulated?
We’ve documented more than 100 instances of apparent data manipulation in Thermo’s catalog
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Thanks for the generous funding from the @wellcometrust.bsky.social and the support from the Advanced Therapies for Regenerative Medicine programme. And thanks to everyone who made it to the end of the thread! 19/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
This was an international collaboration between King's College London @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social , McGill University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University @cedarssinaihsu.bsky.social and TU Dresden @tudresden.bsky.social 18/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Yasmine Kemkem, Miriam Vázquez Segoviano, Emily Lodge, Michel Zamojski, Natalia Mendelev, Zidong Zhang, Gregory Robert Smith, Daniel Bernard, Hui-Chun Lu, Stuart Sealfon and Frédérique Ruf-Zamojski @frederique-nyc.bsky.social . 17/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
This was a truly collaborative effort in data generation and experimental validations. Many thanks to my supervisor Cynthia Andoniadou @pituitarylab.bsky.social and all other co-authors: Thea Willis, Olivia Sherwin, @jameskcl.bsky.social ... 16/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
In addition, we are planning on expanding to human datasets and other species very soon (mostly done actually), and will have a lot more to share on this front. 15/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Importantly, all of these results are reproducible on our new web platform epitome-atlas.com We will do our best to keep the atlas updated on the website. For example, there have been a few new studies recently, which we will incorporate into the atlas soon. 14/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
These results recover almost everything that’s known about the pituitary, and reveal a (final?) set of genes for functional analysis. We validated the spatial localisation of Rfx4 (variant in some hypopituitarism patients!), Runx1, and Six2 in stem cells, and Nhlh2 in gonadotrophs. 13/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Lastly, we turn to chromatin accessibility changes along the pituitary lineage, and find transcription factors that are enriched both in chromatin and gene expression in certain branches. We call these multimodal hits. 12/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
We found that there are several cell-cell interaction genes within stem cell markers, and validate the spatial localisation of two interactions: SLIT2/ROBO1 and NRG1/ERBB4. ROBO1 mutations have been observed in hypopituitarism patients: we might have a small insight into the mechanism now. 11/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Seriously, when will people stop analysing N=1 single-cell datasets? We show that individual studies “find” hundreds of false-positive stem cell markers, and ALWAYS miss about 742 low-expression genes. This is just in stem cells, the situation is even worse across all cell types. 10/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Following this, we derived markers associated with branchpoints in the pituitary developmental lineage. We showed that the atlas can reveal novel low-expression markers in all cases. In addition, we benchmarked individual datasets, and found that results are unreliable for N=1 settings. 9/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Interestingly, stem cells upregulated several senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) ligands with age, as well as the immune checkpoint PD-L1. At the same time, immune cell proportion also increased with age. 8/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
We then also looked at changes with age, which revealed a strong increase in inflammation, and a sharp decrease in cell cycle activity. These were most pronounced in stem cells, but generally were true across the board. 7/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
We find large-scale sex-bias across the board, and that this is mostly driven by sex hormones, as nicely shown by several perturbation datasets. In addition, GATA2 seems to implement an additional layer of male-biased expression in gonadotrophs. 6/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
We then leveraged the metadata of the atlas, and explored differences between male and female samples. A massive limitations of many studies in the past is that they focused only on male samples, ignoring the vast sex bias in gene expression and chromatin accessibility. 5/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Our 1.3 million cell dataset enabled us to train models for cell type annotation, so researchers can transfer information from this atlas to their own datasets (without integration etc.), and hopefully use proper and consistent annotations in their papers. 4/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
We came up with a workflow that enabled automated processing with reasonable speed, high-quality results, and most importantly: it did this all in a consistent manner. I think this is super important: It is not so much about individual software choices, but about being consistent. 3/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Since 2018, there have been 283 samples sequenced (now totalling >1.3 million cells) using either @10xgenomics.bsky.social or Parse Biosciences. Overall, lots of great datasets have been generated, but annotations and analyses remained inconsistent. 2/19
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Really excited to share that the first part of my PhD is now published in Cell Reports @cp-cellreports.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social. We generated the Consensus Pituitary Atlas, a resource of 283 pituitary single-cell samples, totalling ~1.3 million cells. Thread below. 1/19
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King's Dentistry @kingsdentistry.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
The pituitary gland may be small, but its impact is huge - regulating growth, stress, reproduction and more. Now, a new study has created a detailed map of how this essential gland works. www.kcl.ac.uk/news/new-atl...
kcl.ac.uk
New Atlas reveals more about how the body's “master gland” really works | King's College London
A new study has created a detailed map of the pituitary gland, often called the body’s “master gland” as it controls important functions like growth, stress, and reproduction.
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William DeWitt @wsdewitt.github.io · 29/04/2026
Arc Institute’s “MULTI-evolve” learns a classical additive model, not epistasis. Preprint (w/ Gian Marco Visani and Aayush Verma): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Blog: dewitt-lab.github.io/posts/2026-0...
dewitt-lab.github.io
Additivity is all you need?
Arc Institute’s “MULTI-evolve” learns a classical additive model, not epistasis.
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Reposted by Bence Kövér
Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 09/05/2026
In my book Twilight of Democracy, I wrote about how authoritarian populism had divided friends, including in Hungary. After Prime Minister Magyar was sworn in today, he said he hoped "Family, friends and communities will be able to speak to each other again." www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
theguardian.com
Péter Magyar sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister to end 16-year Orbán era
Jubilation in Budapest as Péter Magyar becomes leader and invites people to ‘step through gate of regime change’
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Amongst the many cool things, we: - characterised SOX2+ expressing cells across PPGLs - identified expression signatures associated with metastatic potential - identified changes in expression between SOX2+ high versus SOX2+ low samples The paper is now out in @endocancer.bsky.social
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
I’m really glad to have been a part of this exciting project studying rare neuroendocrine tumours called phaeochromocytomas and paragangliomas. We performed 10x Genomics single-cell/nucleus RNA-seq on 7 PPGL patients, and integrated published data from another 12 patients. doi.org/10.1530/ERC-...
doi.org
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scverse @scverse.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
We’ll be sharing a detailed blog post in the coming days with everything that was built, discussed, and what comes next. Stay tuned 🚀
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
A really great and in-depth summary by @heineikeb.bsky.social on our new paper where we dissect the genetics of multicellular-like phenotypes in fission yeast. It was truly a great project the work on, and strongly shaped me as a scientist. I never thought sticky yeast could be so cool! Thanks Ben!
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Yarui Diao @yaruidiao.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Happy to share scHiCAR, an ultra-high throughout (millions of cells), low cost (5 cents/cell including NGS), and trimodal platform for integrated single-cell level analysis of mRNA, open chromatin, and 5-kb resolution looping with ground-truth data the same individual cell.
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
The $100 whole human genome sequence finally reached! www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/02/19/s...
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
And unfortunately Wilcoxon remains what most people do in their standard scRNA-seq differential expression analysis between thousands of pseudoreplicates…
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KaminskiMed @kaminskimed.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
Not sure why @lpachter.bsky.social did not post this here. But it is brilliant. Single cell genomics finally makes it to the clinic.
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Nikolai Slavov @slavov-n.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
The protein concentration in the cytoplasm is so high that the average protein has a water hydration shell with a thickness of only ≈ 10 water molecules separating it from the adjacent protein hydration shell. 1/2
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Excited to release the Consensus Pituitary Atlas, which brings a shared framework to process, annotate, and analyze single-cell datasets in the mouse pituitary. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Arnau Sebé-Pedrós @arnausebe.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
Happy to share the Biodiversity Cell Atlas white paper, out today in @nature.com. We look at the possibilities, challenges, and potential impacts of molecularly mapping cells across the tree of life. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Bence Kövér @bencekover.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
It was really great to connect with people working on similar technologies and approaches. Looking forward to engaging more with the bioinformatics community in London.
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