15 years in the making, we confirmed that mitochondria -the powerhouse of the cell- have an unusual localization in patients who experience psychosis (including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders). You’ll never guess what kind of patient cells we used to make this discovery...🧵 … unless you’ve heard me talk about it, which I’ve done a lot over the past decade :D

Including in this Quanta video:

Last week I was invited to sign a letter offering support for David Sabatini, organized by current & former lab members. Universities considering hiring him have asked for this.
I will not sign.

There was no option to provide a more nuanced response, so I will elaborate here 🧵 First, I want to be clear that those organizing are people I feel fondly towards, due to our shared experiences together growing as scientists. No one pressured me to sign and I appreciate that.

8 w Covid in our house. We are all fine now (yay science! Thanks vaccines!!), but wanted to share our testing results in case it helps decision making. 🧵

TL;DR: antigen and PCR tests were both unreliable making it very difficult to know whom to quarantine from whom. First problem: we had mostly neg at-home/antigen tests even when symptomatic. The only + tests were those w worst symptoms (unboosted), plus one throat swab (don’t eat/drink 30 minutes before!) In one case, person was neg, then + a day later despite big symptoms both days.

Pharma spends millions of $$ for *each* screen where they test millions of compounds to find those impacting a given protein’s activity.

What if we could just... look up the right compounds in a catalog w a computational query? 🤯🤯🤯

Preprint alert from Carpenter-Singh lab! 🧵 (Here’s a shortcut to the full paper on Biorxiv): biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…

Do you want to attract computational biologists to your project?

Do you want to attract computational biologists to your department?

With a dozen colleagues around the globe, we present "A field guide to cultivating computational biology"!

Read on! arxiv.org/submit/3712561… Before we begin: computational biology has made major contributions and the culture is healthier than ever. Still, those attempting to bridge the interdisciplinary gap often languish in career advancement, publication, and grant review. So we focus on solutions here!

Impact score 10! 😮🎉

I only applied for this major grant because an NIH Program Officer went out of his way to encourage me.

How many don't flourish in their careers because someone isn't looking out for them? How can YOU take this role for someone, esp. those less privileged? I had to stare at it, and have my colleague look at ERA commons, just to be sure it really meant what I thought. Both of us, seasoned scientists, started questioning the scoring system and had to doublecheck 😄.

Top tips for those attending a professional conference for the first time!

1. It's ok if you only understand the first few minutes of a talk (when the topic is being introduced). Absorb what you can, then tune in for the next talk. Many times it's the speaker at fault, not you. 2. Conference rooms are notoriously cold: wear some extra layers and maybe a scarf.

Wow, this is super misleading, as if academics are routinely curing things and handing drugs over for pharma for them to profit with little further investment.

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1091439100589211648

https://twitter.com/DrAnneCarpenter/status/1091710004191735809