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Niko McCarty 🧫 Profile picture
@NikoMcCarty
Jul 8 • 32 tweets • 8 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
🧬 30 Days of Great Biology Papers.

From the origins of the genetic code to pioneering work on circadian rhythms...these are my favorite snapshots from the history of biology.

All the papers — and explanations — in a single thread: 🧵
Day 1

"Thoughts About Biology," James Bonner, 1960.

Day 2

"Bmp4 and Morphological Variation of Beaks in Darwin's Finches," by Abzhanov et al. (2004)

Day 3

"Physical Limits to Sensation and Perception," by William Bialek, 1987.

Day 4

"Regeneration of Hydra from Reaggregated Cells." (1972)

Day 5

"The replication of DNA in Escherichia coli," Meselson & Stahl (1958)

Day 6

"Biology is more theoretical than physics," by J. Gunawardena (2013).

Day 7

"Resolution of distinct rotational substeps by submillisecond kinetic analysis of F1-ATPase," by Yasuda et al. (2001)

Day 8

"101 Unsolved Puzzles in Evo-Devo" by Lewis Held.

Day 9

"Functional roles for noise in genetic circuits," by Eldar & Elowitz, 2010.

Day 10

"Primer-directed enzymatic amplification of DNA with a thermostable DNA polymerase," by Saiki R.K. et al.

Day 11

"Genetic regulatory mechanisms in the synthesis of proteins," by Jacob & Monod (1961).

Day 12

"Comprehensive mapping of long range interactions reveals folding principles of the human genome."

Day 13

"The structure and connexions of neurons," by Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Day 14

"Biological Networks: The Tinkerer as an Engineer," by Uri Alon (2003).

Day 15

"How Cats Lap: Water Uptake by Felis catus." (2010)

Day 16

"Expression of a Gene Cluster kaiABC as a Circadian Feedback Process in Cyanobacteria." Ishiura M. et al. (1998).

Day 17

Letter from Utopia, by Nick Bostrom.

This one was maybe not a good pick in hindsight!

Day 18

"Life at Low Reynolds Number," by E.M. Purcell (1976).

Day 19

"How Genetics Got a Chemical Education," by Erwin Chargaff, 1979.

Day 20

The story of IVF (3 papers)

Day 21

"On protein synthesis," by F.H.C. Crick.

Day 22

Deleted. It was "A conserved strategy for inducing appendage regeneration in moon jellyfish, Drosophila, and mice."
Day 23

"The genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans," by Sydney Brenner (1974).

Day 24

"A C. elegans mutant that lives twice as long as wild type," by Kenyon C. et al. (1993).

Day 25

"The biomass distribution on Earth" & "Cell Biology by the Numbers."

Day 26

"Reconstitution of ribosome self-replication outside a living cell," by Kosaka et al. (2022).

Day 27

"Circadian Rhythms in Man," by Jürgen Aschoff (1965).

Day 28

"The Lives of a Cell," by Lewis Thomas (1971).

Day 29

"Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: The primary kingdoms," by Carl Woese & George Fox (1977).

Day 30

"General Nature of the Genetic Code for Proteins," by F. Crick, S. Brenner, L. Barnett & R.J. Watts-Tobin (1961).

Thank you for reading!

Please subscribe to my newsletter if you feel like it! It's filled with interesting things!

readcodon.com

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More from @NikoMcCarty

Niko McCarty 🧫 Profile picture
Jun 3
David Goodsell's paintings beautifully depict proteins and living cells.

Here's how to visualize a protein in this style. In under 5 minutes.🧵 ImageImage
The first image, above, is Cas9. Some domains are highlighted.

The second image is by David Goodsell.

Step 1. Download PyMOL. It's free for the first 30 days, at least.

pymol.org/dokuwiki/doku.…
Step 2. Find your protein.

Go to rcsb.org and search. I entered "Cas9" and selected 4CMP, entitled "Crystal structure of S. pyogenes Cas9."

Other structures show Cas9 in complex with a guide RNA. Image
Read 11 tweets
Niko McCarty 🧫 Profile picture
Mar 31
There have been an incredible number of gene-editing advances (including in delivery) over the last three days.

Here are 7 of them...🧵
1. Start with delivery.

Feng Zhang's group developed "programmable" injectors that can deliver protein payloads in mice + human cells with "efficiencies approaching 100%"

Delivered Cas9 & base editors. You've probably already seen this one on Twitter.

nature.com/articles/s4158…
2. Inhalable nanoparticles, packaged with mRNA or CRISPR systems, efficiently edit lung cells.

720 ionizable lipids were tested to make the ✨perfect✨ particles. High editing efficiencies in airway epithelial cells (which are normally hard to target.)

nature.com/articles/s4158…
Read 9 tweets
Niko McCarty 🧫 Profile picture
Feb 5
🖭🖭 A Brief History of Parafilm 🖭🖭

"Cling wrap on steroids." "Duct tape of science." "The forbidden lab cheese." Parafilm has many names.

But what is this stuff? Where did it come from? And can you actually eat it? 🧵

cell.substack.com/p/parafilm
Despite a booming number of memes, the history of this wonder material is shrouded in obscurity.

To understand parafilm, we must go way back — 200 years back — to the dawn of paraffin and oil wells.

Paraffin Origin 🕯️

In 1830, a tar-obsessed man named Carl Reichenbach cooled petroleum and watched a layer of wax form on top.

He called this paraffin, from the Latin for 'parum' and 'affinis,' meaning 'very little' and 'lacking affinity.'

The guy's got a nice, little smirk.🔻
Read 18 tweets
Niko McCarty 🧫 Profile picture
Feb 1
The wacky history of glow-in-the-dark plants 🌱

A few years ago, "Glowing Plants" raised $484,000 on Kickstarter. Backlash followed and the platform banned gene-editing projects.

The original company died in 2017, but others took their place.

These are the highlights. 🧵 Image
Our story begins in molecular biology's golden era, 1986.

A small cadre of biologists & chemists at UCSD reported, in @ScienceMagazine, the "stable expression of the firefly luciferase gene in...transgenic plants."

The results were impressive.

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… Image
Decades later, in 2010, a group from Indiana University took up the spiritual torch of that initial project.

Specifically, they took all six genes from a firefly's lux operon, and ported them into tobacco plants.

The plants glowed, but...meh.
doi.org/10.1371/journa… Image
Read 26 tweets
Niko McCarty 🧫 Profile picture
Jan 30
🧬Making DNA: The Quest for Synthetic Life

We're in the midst of a revolution in DNA synthesis.

But biology's grand plans — synthetic life, a solarpunk future — are hindered by major tech flaws & laughable biosecurity.

Read the 6,800 word essay.🔻
cell.substack.com/p/dna
The story of DNA synthesis begins in 1972.

A biochemist in Wisconsin, H.G. Khorana, built 77 bases of DNA using chemistry and his brain.

He extended the sequence to 207 bases. The synthetic DNA worked in living cells. It took 200 person-years of work. doi.org/10.1126/scienc…
Just 30 years later, the @JCVenterInst built the world's first synthetic, bacterial genome from 582,000 bases of DNA.

In 2010, a natural genome was stripped from one cell, and in went the synthetic version. The cells 'booted up'.

Cost: $40 million.

doi.org/10.1126/scienc…
Read 19 tweets
Niko McCarty 🧫 Profile picture
Dec 5, 2022
AI has changed writing forever.

Tools to start a one-person (science) newsroom:
1. Find a paper to write about.

Use Explain Paper (@explain_paper) to understand the research. Highlight confusing passages and get an explanation.
2. Or find a "trend" to cover, like current progress in DNA synthesis, or how to engineer human intelligence.

Use @elicitorg, search for your topic, and find related papers. This works better than PubMed if you want to quickly find evidence.
Read 10 tweets

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