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Adam Gracz

@graczlab.bsky.social

1.9K followers 1.1K following 124 posts

Genetic regulation of cell identity and regeneration | All things gut & liver | Opinions are my own | www.graczlab.org

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

...but how could we apply this panel of 7 genes as usable BEC subpopulation biomarkers? Kendall developed a 9-color RNA FISH panel, capable of identifying both enrichment of an "on target" metagene and de-enrichment of all other "off target" metagenes (also capable of making pretty images)

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Bc of this transcriptional similarity, most differentially expressed genes were expressed across all BEC clusters, just at slightly variable levels. To identify cluster-specific biomarkers, Kendall applied "metagenes", mostly consisting of two overlapping genes to define a candidate subpopulation.

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

scRNA-seq has been powerful for cell-cell heterogeneity in other systems, but liver atlases present BECs as a single population with little apparent transcriptional diversity. We observed that injury and hepatocyte identity were the only major drivers of "distinct" clusters in our own data.

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Congratulations to Dr. Nic Janto, who defended his PhD in the GMB Program at Emory earlier this week! Nic is headed off to postdoc with Edan Foley at The University of Bath. It’s the end of an era for the lab, but very excited to follow Nic’s journey into zebrafish models of intestinal biology! 🐟

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Excited for a packed day of science at the inaugural Cholestatic Liver Disease Summit!

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

CONGRATS to @hannahhrncir.bsky.social, who successfully defended her PhD on Friday! 🥳 A major milestone for the lab and a tour de force of liver research from Dr. Hrncir. Her next stop is the Caron Lab at UNC (@unc-cbp.bsky.social). Very proud of all Hannah accomplished in a short 5yrs!

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Among all the bad news about science, I had to share some beautiful new imaging of the mouse liver from @hannahhrncir.bsky.social in my lab. CEACAM1 (red) and Sox9EGFP (green).

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

No freeze on fun! Taking a little break from the chaos for an overdue lab holiday dinner. It’s a good time to be grateful for getting to work with such a hardworking and dedicated group of scientists. Truly the best part of the job!

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

New lab decor, courtesy of @hannahhrncir.bsky.social and @kkanak.bsky.social ! Most of the meme references had to be explained to me 👴🏻🫠

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

To directly test the requirement of aISC survival in organoid survival, we used the Lgr5-2A-DTR allele from Nick Barker's lab to ablate residual aISCs after DXR. Sure enough, organoid survival drops to 0 even at lower doses of DXR... 4/x

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

What we didn't expect was that some aISCs from before injury appear to survive an initial "pulse" of DXR. Through some imaging and flow experiments (including using Sox9EGFP+ organoids), our data suggested that organoids can't survive DXR if they lose all of their aISCs... 3/x

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Adam Gracz @graczlab.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

the tldr; is that we can model active ISC (aISC) damage and facultative ISC (fISC) gene activation with doxorubicin (DXR) in organoids. Not surprising because DXR is known to target aISC in vivo... 2/x

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