iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua Heyza @heyzajr.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

A cool collaboration with Houra Merrikh led by Oyku Sensoy. Oyku identified a moonlighting function of asparaginyl tRNA synthetase in preventing replication-restart from RNA:DNA hybrids in B. subtilis.

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Reposted by Joshua Heyza

Jens Schmidt @jenscs83.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

New Print Alert! A fun collab with Kathy Meek at MSU. Led by talented bioinformatician Giovanni Pascarella we demonstrate that Ku70/80 binds intronic antisense Alu elements to inhibit cryptic splice sites. For details see the thread below! 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Ku limits aberrant mRNA splicing promoted by intronic antisense Alu elements

Alu elements are short repeats that occupy approximately 10% of the human genome. Saturation of primate genomes with Alu sequences occurred at the prosimian/new-world monkey evolutionary juncture. Alu...

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Reposted by Joshua Heyza

Jens Schmidt @jenscs83.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Super excited to share our most recent pre-print, lead by K99 fellow @heyzajr.bsky.social, who will be starting his own lab at Wayne State University in February! The question is how are DNA breaks held together during HR?? 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

The PST repeat region of MDC1 is a tunable multivalent chromatin tethering domain

DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) are widely considered the most cytotoxic DNA lesions occurring in cells because they physically disrupt the connectivity of the DNA double helix. Homologous recombinati...

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Reposted by Joshua Heyza

Jens Schmidt @jenscs83.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Here is a fun little teaser! What DNA repair factor does this to mitotic chromosomes? Pre-print should be up any time now! Exciting work by @heyzajr.bsky.social!

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