iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by King L Hung

Rose Z. Hill, Ph.D. @rose-hill.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Our story on mechanosensation in baroreceptor cells of the kidney is finally out! Well worth the wait on this project we began in 2020 that turned into a massive collaborative effort within the kidney field. 🫘 www.sciencedirect.com:5037/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

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King L Hung @kinglhung.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Our paper is out in @nature.com! Oncogenes are often copy-number amplified on extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) in cancer, but how is ecDNA inherited by dividing cells? Here we identified elements within ecDNA that promote its retention in dividing cells. 1/11 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Genetic elements promote retention of extrachromosomal DNA in cancer cells - Nature

A combination of genome-wide functional screening, imaging and chromatin profiling identifies a new class of highly prevalent genomic elements that help retain extrachromosomal DNA copies in dividing ...

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Cancer Grand Challenges @cancergrand.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

🎉 Congratulations to @kinglhung.bsky.social‬ from team eDyNAmiC for receiving the prestigious prize and for having his essay, “Oncogenes out of context: Cancer genes break free from the regulatory constraints of chromosomes”, published in @science.org. 📖 Read more - lnkd.in/ekMqXC6J

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King L Hung @kinglhung.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Honored to receive the Science & SciLifeLab Prize! Very grateful to all my mentors and colleagues. I wrote an article in @science.org about my PhD thesis research on extrachromosomal DNA at Stanford @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Ardem Patapoutian @ardemp.bskyverified.social · 13/11/2025

And here is the story after peer review. This work highlights our current approach, which is to use Piezo channels to uncover new areas of biology that are shaped by mechanical forces: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

PIEZO channels link mechanical forces to uterine contractions in parturition

Mechanical forces are extensively involved in pregnancy and parturition, but their precise roles and mechanisms remain poorly understood. We identified mechanically activated ion channels PIEZO1 and P...

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Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

Dear Fly Community,

In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled.

The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC).

Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options.

To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum).

To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase

Our immediate goals are:

1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online

2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance).

Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data.

At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise.

Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028.

We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide.

Sincerely,
The FlyBase Team

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Ardem Patapoutian @ardemp.bskyverified.social · 09/04/2025

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.” A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world. www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...

cnn.com

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN

Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

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King L Hung @kinglhung.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Cool approach to isolate extrachromosomal DNA: karyotyping by FACS! Wish I had thought of it. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Maya Voichek @mayavoichek.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬 But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯 Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread 🧵👇

Drosophila follicle showing retrotransposons (pink & yellow) expressed in somatic cells infecting the oocyte

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Reposted by King L Hung

Katherine J. Wu @katherinejwu.com · 07/03/2025

if you've had an NIH grant terminated, I want to hear about it. Signal: katherinejwu.12

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Ardem Patapoutian @ardemp.bskyverified.social · 01/03/2025

The Patapoutian lab started 25 years ago on March 1, 2000. A quarter-century of science with brilliant trainees, colleagues & collaborators. Cheers to my mentors & mentees! Excited to celebrate with past & present lab members in November. Here’s to more great science 🧪 and better times ahead!

media.tenor.com

a cat is laying on top of the number 25

ALT: a cat is laying on top of the number 25

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Sonya Neal @neal-lab.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Flooding BlueSky with good news today. Neal lab received a NoA! Grateful our NIH R35 MIRA renewal is funded to support our ongoing work on membrane protein quality! 🙏🙏

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King L Hung @kinglhung.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Opportunity to work with an amazing scientist!

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Ardem Patapoutian @ardemp.bskyverified.social · 16/12/2024

Join our lab! We're hiring a research technician—a great opportunity for individuals with a Bachelor's degree who want to gain valuable research experience before heading to medical or graduate school. recruiting2.ultipro.com/SCR1003TSRI/...

recruiting2.ultipro.com

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King L Hung @kinglhung.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Hi bluesky! A re-introduction: I am a cell biologist interested in cellular signaling logic and decision making. I worked on cancer genomes in my PhD at Stanford, and am now a postdoc working on how cells interpret force at Scripps in the Patapoutian lab. Excited to reconnect here!

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Susan Gasser @susanmgasser.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Two back-to-back papers in Nature comms from mylab explore the link between destabilization of the actin cytoskeleton and aberrant base excision repair - passing through nuclear actin and the actin-dependent nucleosome remodeler INO80C.

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Anton Henssen @anton-henssen.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

First re-post on @bsky.app . Great collaboration between @kinglhung.bsky.social and team eDyNAmiC !! 🔥🔥👇🏻👇🏻

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Trevor Graham @trevorgraham.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Lovely paper showing co-segregation and co-selection of multiple species of ecDNA within cancer cells. Nice computational modelling and inference of segregation and selection coefficients too @benjaminwerner.bsky.social and Weini Huang!

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King L Hung @kinglhung.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Cancer cells often harbor oncogenes outside chromosomes on extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA), which is unevenly inherited by dividing cells. We reported in Nature last week that collectives of ecDNAs are inherited together by dividing cancer cells. 1/ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Coordinated inheritance of extrachromosomal DNAs in cancer cells - Nature

Cooperative species of extrachromosomal DNAs are coordinately inherited through mitotic co-segregation.

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Henry De Belly @henrydebelly.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Sharing my latest preprint as a re-introduction to bsky! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... ---- Everyday, cells like this crawl through your body to protect you. While we know that their front 🔴 and back 🔵 polarity programs work together, how exactly do these two processes communicate?

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

High-resolution of cancer. Unprecedented. A brief review of what we've just learned from 17 new papers in the latest edition of Ground Truths. It's free, open-access. erictopol.substack.com/p/cancer-sci...

erictopol.substack.com

Cancer Science in On a Tear

New insights on evolution, resistance, and therapies

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Matthew Freeman @mjafreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Waves of new BlueSky arrivals in last few days! I’ve been tracking starter packs relevant to molecular/mechanistic/genetic/cellular…etc biology Hope it’s helpful but warning: now a v long thread! Probably the last time I can do this...

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