Alex Bisson
@Archaeon_Alex
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🇧🇷🇺🇸Cell Biology of Archaea. Assistant Professor at Brandeis University.
Waltham-MA
Joined November 2009
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knowing that a friend's paper was rejected after 3 years under review at
@Nature
is just devastating. Asking for animal data that takes years and just claim "the hypothesis is not novel anymore" is low. It's irresponsible to research money spent. Reviewers also need to do better.
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who needs board and dart games? I want a pub with shared microscopes.
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The lab is mass producing tardigrades and I have no idea what to do with so many
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That was fast,
@MolMicroEditors
!
First of all, all the credits to James Walsh, Iain Duggin (
@iduggin
) and Paul Curmi. Am very happy to have contributed to your work.
Here, you will see a lot of triangular archaeal cells like our "Dorito" that divides into 3 viable daughters:
Recently accepted: Division plane placement in pleomorphic archaea is dynamically coupled to cell shape....
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I am thrilled to announce I'm starting my lab
@BrandeisU
this fall. The Bisson Lab will investigate the cellular organization and cytoskeleton dynamics in the astonishing archaeal world. Keep an eye out for open positions - and our website filled with cool movies like these
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I want to design a lecture on misconceptions in biology. What is the most imprecise/dubious term/concept in biology?
I already have 2: multicellularity and gene function
Help me build the list.
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Haloarchaea rarely build beautiful biofilm structures, but when they do they outperform it! These little guys love to organize in face of competition. Plate from our very own John Mallon.
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starting a low-tech winogradsky column, but able to image microbes in real-time. Not great yet but getting there.
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Tip for those still using restriction enzymes for cloning, or anyone using commercial Gibson reactions: I finally calculate how much $ and time it's spent in my lab by producing our own home-made Gibsons (1/n)
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This is a reminder to ECRs that awards and prizes are one of the cancers of innovation and scientific discovery. They usually go to the wrong people or to the right ones for the wrong reasons. Kariko only got them when she no longer needed them.
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It's amazing how much some PIs can be super nice here on Twitter, saying all the right things, but in the real world, they ignore or are mean to trainees just because they work in the lab of someone they have a petty peeve (1/3)
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We preprinted 2 papers: 2 new archaeal actins - volactin (H. volcanii) and salactin (H. salinarum). In each paper, we worked together with different groups and found out that they are actins with different cellular functions! (1/n)
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I am speechless. Thank you Pew for sharing our excitement for archaea and the future of microbial cell biology and diversity. As a Latino, being part of the Pew community comes with a deeper meaning. It's something I've been looking forward to since I was a grad student in Brazil
22 researchers join the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences to investigate questions surrounding human health and disease.
Members of this year’s class are exploring how animals select food, the evolution of cancer cells, and more.
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After all these years, I still have the chills when I see a beautiful negative stain. But this time Yadong made the grade. This is definitely the most beautiful TEM from FtsZ filaments I've ever seen. Look at this contrast!
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This is an exciting week. Tomorrow is my first day as a PI at
@BrandeisU
. At the same time I'm submitting my first grant together with amazing collaborators. And I'm psyched to see my lab website online - - with amazing illustration made by Lara Rangel!
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One issue with open science for microscopists is storage. Just this past Friday I collected 600Gb of data. This is prelim and not close of what the paper is gonna look like in the end. My wish is to make all our publish data available online but how to store it?
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@ProfTimothyCox
@osamaharraz
@Nature
If a company does not serve the scientific community ethically, scientists should boicott them. This behavior should not pass unnoticed anymore. We have more power than we think. Starting by not telling our trainees that CNS papers matter, and stop evaluating as they do.
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We found a new actin in H. salinarum - hence salactin - required to segregate chr at low ploidy. Salactin could also orchestrate DNA recomb. given the conserved repair genes in its genomic neighborhood.
Congrats to first authors Jenny Zheng (Garner) and John Mallon (Bisson)
Exciting new actin homologue, with
@tweethinking
@fleshball
@Archaeon_Alex
and led by Jenny Zheng.
Salactin is unique to Methanotecta but rather interestingly its closest relative we found to be MamK (found in magenetotactic bacteria)!
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The lab now is convinced they can evolve haloarchaea to produce spicy -pink salt crystals and sell to white people in Southern California.
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The Bisson Lab has been on fire this year. I'm proud of our researchers and excited about the papers coming up.
We finally start to see healthy Haloquadratum cells (figuring out 24h light-dark cycles is not easy). And they look beautiful and we are already learning new biology:
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Scientists are the most dogmatic and risk-averse group. Good quality equipment lasting decades doesn't exist anymore. All of them break after 2-10y. And even if they do, 10x cheaper stuff lasting 2y will still be cheaper. Here an example from my lab (1/6)
Wow the comments against these hardware are so baseless. Thanks
@nootlabs_
for the heads up. I love how trained scientists are dunking on cheap labware without acutally showing evidence of their claims. How very...scientific. Prove its crap or you're just blowing hot air.
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Dear SciTwitter, I come to ask for a huge favor (a thread). Some postdocs
@FuturePI_Slack
(me included) are tracking statistics of who went on the job market last year. We want to collect quantitative data to help sci policy-making and improve PI search/hiring in academia (1/5)
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This is so confusing. The minion ready has a cover. Is the tape protecting the flowcell from its own LEDs? Please someone helps me understand!
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tired of reading academics justifying in person conf as vacations from their families and hang out with friends. It's the sad reality of how we failed in our work-life balance. crazy how much of the taxpayer money is spent on fancy hotels and time away from kids.
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I would not have my postdoc paper and my Ass Prof positions if it wasn't for JF dyes sent for free from
@rhodamine110
and
@jonathangrimm
. And I want to briefly tell the story because (IMO) exemplifies why to distribute reagents and knowledge for free creates value (1/7)
'A group leader decided that his lab would share the fluorescent dyes they create, for free and without authorship requirements. Nearly 12,000 aliquots later, he reveals what has happened since.'
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I don't often image archaea with gas vesicles, but I always love to see them there. It's a mystery how they can remain in the same spot for long periods and not diffuse everywhere in the cytoplasm. Maybe a challenge for
@CellfOrganized
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There are 3 lessons here
1) There is no more "cheap" and "good" stuff on standard lab hardware anymore
2) You are paying 20x more just because you were told to
3) Why unis do not keep machinists in-house instead of making PIs spend $10-100k in plastic and cheap mechanics? (6/6)
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Our preprint on the academic job market is finally out! How does a successful candidate in the academic job market look like? What should you do to land that tenure-track professor position? [1/4]
What does the academic job market look like? Do I need a CNS paper? (no) Do I need a K99? (no) How many applications? (>15)
It’s peak application season & the
@FuturePI_Slack
survey results are in!
Here's some key takeaways 1/6
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Celebrating the first week of the very first 3 members of the Bisson Lab! With the theme "we survived"!
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Today is full of celebrations. postdoc starting a new thrust in the lab. And we received the HFSP Award! I'm psyched to study archaeal mechanosensing with
@TBharat_lab
and
@Vikram_Alva
. Lots to be thankful for. science brought such special friends from all parts of the world.
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@DanielBolnick
@JChrisPires
@Nature
They should be sued and financially liable for the public money they wasted.
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The lab is now adding soundtracks to our timelapses. Who would know that tubulins create inter-dimensional portals within cells?
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Hopefully our lab will be able to contribute with several new examples of Archaeal multicellularity soon. Papers should come up next year!
Glad the lab has contributed to this book!
@freejakoba
made a thorough revision of clonal
#multicellularity
in
#prokaryotes
and
#eukaryotes
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I bet it would still brick when I open Fiji and Illustrator at the same time
🚨 Google's new Quantum Computer completes the task in 6 seconds that would have taken one of the world's best computers 47 years.
Quantum computers can change what we can build and how we understand the world.
Here's everything you need to know:
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Spread the word!
(1/2) Latin Americans who dream to do research in the US: the Pew Foundation has an amazing fellowship. See the video and let me know if you have questions:
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I never understood all the hate against my man comic sans
@MaxPrigozhin
Is this considered chaotic good? Clear crisp plots of data but comic sans font for slide title 🤔
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@ProfTomEllis
I downloaded all lab member pages from HHMI investigator profiles and plotted them randomly. Didn't get most of them (only 105). Subtracted Undergrads and managers. You how many are below 10 scientists/group? 4 PIs only. HHMI doesn't even care about their own suggested practices
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So excited to preparations to trap Archaea with optical tweezers and stretch and compress them. With
@JLinSMBioPhy
and
@LUMICKS_nl
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Sending parcels with haloarchaea strains to 4 diferent groups today. 3 just starting working with Archaea. This is a good day.
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This is so confusing. The minion ready has a cover. Is the tape protecting the flowcell from its own LEDs? Please someone helps me understand!
So
@nanopore
discovered something a few days ago - and it has to do with light. And they posted this image (sorry, too good not to share off the community). Yes, that’s 469% increased output. So, we decided to give it a shot and …
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7y ago I was arriving in Boston to start my postdoc. So young I was able to drink this much booze. Nowadays I get hungover even when I don't drink
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We have a new story out at BiorXiv! Amazing work led by
@za_curtis
(Bisson), Pedro Escudeiro (Alva) and John Mallon (Bisson).
Great collaboration with
@Vikram_Alva
(Max Planck) and
@pohlschr
(UPenn).
A summary of our findings in the thread (1/22)
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Our developed a new inducible-promoter for the archaeon Haloferax volcanii. Kudos for the first authors Theopi Rados (research Staff) and Katie Andre (*MCB rotation student*), and my co-corresp author Micaela Cerletti (visiting scholar) (1/6)
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SoRa images of the pleomorphic archaeon Haloferax volcanii taken by the Twitterless Theopi Rados. Keep an eye out for her upcoming paper (possibly my best work). Theopi is also applying for grad school programs next year. You won't have a better student, I promise.
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I'm so proud of this paper. It's my first correspondent author's work. It's my first paper with
@pohlschr
, who I met only recently and hit off so quickly! And it's scientifically delightful as it demonstrates how archaeal cells teach us new tricks. Here are the take-home msgs
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Our Pxyl paper is out. Congrats to
@theopi
and Katie Andre (co-1st) and my invaluable co-last Micaela Cerletti. This was a fast paper, less than a year from concept to pub.
Thank you
@A_CharlesOrszag
(best editor) and our reviewers for correcting us.
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@IdentityEuleria
@JChrisPires
@Nature
Yes. But the point (implicit I agree) of the post is that we as a community have a responsability to protect our funds from toxic, predatory companies that have no commitment to the advance of science.
I personally have my own criticism of how the authors handled the process.
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Science in the time of COVID: Theopi just loving our instant pot, aka advanced lab autoclave
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Cellpose2 rules. Our amazing postdoc John Mallon is now training our crappy datasets. So much info hidden behind shattered souls after 1-day Timelapses now ready today be rescued
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We are looking for a postdoc. We have a wide range of interests in mechanobiology and cytoskeleton dynamics. We are in Boston, and pay NIH scale in the 1st 2y ($55k and $60k) and above ($70k) later. For more, please read our mission and goals in the link:
We preprinted 2 papers: 2 new archaeal actins - volactin (H. volcanii) and salactin (H. salinarum). In each paper, we worked together with different groups and found out that they are actins with different cellular functions! (1/n)
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Archaea are squishy. Archaea hate shear and pushers. They just want to let them be by the lakeshore. So how Archaea convert biophysical signals into biochemical information? How it shaped our own unique mechanosensing gunpowder? Our multidisciplinary team will tackle this pickle.
How do cells perceive mechanical cues? A three-year grant will allow
@Vikram_Alva
,
@TBharat_lab
, and
@_Alex_Bisson_
to study
#mechanosensing
in
#archaea
and bridge the gap between eukaryotic and prokaryotic perception. Read more here:
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PaperS (plural) submitted!!!! 😭😭😭
And another one to kick out of the door before the end of the month.
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Time flies. Today is the 9th anniversary of my PhD defense. Brings back so many good (and not so good) memories. But I can only remember the feeling of the good ones, and I am grateful for that. It also makes me nostalgic to see our students going through this adventure! (1/7)
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My admiration to
@BrunLabCaulo
and others for the amazing work on MicrobeJ. 6+ years providing free and updated image segmentation+analysis. This is how our students start learning about image segmentation and quantitation. We need more continued projects like this.
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A student in our lab just shared the work of this artist-scientist:
This is something we all could contribute as a statement (even that considered a small act). We created our version for archaea and will include it in our website, science talks posters!
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And we will have new cool movies and project updates!
update your lab website is dangerous. Only now months later, I noticed
@OliviaSLeland
created a meme page!
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I get in the lab and see this in one of our boards. I laughed hard on the shortestest-living part. Poor things
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First, you need to read this preprint from
@BrianRabe6
and Cepko. Everything you need to know about how to make your own reactions. If you need help, just DM/email me. (2/n)
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Can't be happier and prouder of our PhD students
@za_curtis
and
@OliviaSLeland
passing their quals exam! They're our dear physicists who keep us biologists in touch with reality 😅. Our lab is lucky to have you!
(of course, now they are allowed access to the pink salt lamp)
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Nothing better than hearing screams of excitement after a busy morning and realize it's Archaea Battle Royale day in our lab.
"There can be only one"
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As I finish the responses to reviewers for one of our recent papers, I realize how my mentality as reviewer myself changed in the past year.
One of my goals has been to make papers better. Today, I see how this is the origin of a lot of bad incentives. (1/3)
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Another beautiful day at Brandeis. It's always a happy day when it's PI at the bench day.
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Cell Bio has always been, since its infancy, about elegance, simplicity and detail-oriented. Arthur's story is beautiful for all of the above qualities.
And Arthur will be in the job market. What an opportunity to have a proper micro-cell biologist of this calliber in your Dpt.
Archaea can twitch too! In our new preprint we show that, despite the absence of a retraction ATPase, S. acidocaldarius cells undergo twitching motility. Awesome collaboration between
@MullinsLab
@Archaellum
@marleenvw
and
@samjlord
.
🧵 1/4
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My heart was not completely shattered this time. Here is a comparison between sfGFP (our go-to FP in haloarchaea) versus mBaoJin. To ensure mBJ is functional, we tagged them to HalA, a cytoskeleton in Hfx volcanii (see more: ).
Bacteria and archaea folks:
have you had the chance to test the new mStayGold variants? I want to give it a shot but not feeling testing all 3 (am I not updated and are new ones already?):
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Happy 3y anniversary lab! As always, dressing up to catch the commuter rail 😏
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This is so simple, obvious, and groundbreaking at the same time. It changes the way we read papers!!!! Thank you,
@SSarabipour
for the tireless effort to convince people to move forward. Growth is painful but necessary for development.
bioRxiv can now display relevant conference/seminar videos alongside preprints e.g. 1/2
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SciTwitter: Could you help me finding virtual seminar series (from any field) that persist in the past months/years? I know there are a few that got really famous (cell size control, caulobacter etc) but I can't see to find websites/contact persons.
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I love when H. salinarum cells pop and release their gas vesicles. Let's see if we can isolate them from cells now
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Very educative thread.
Don't wait to be happy doing science until you have "made it". There is no end. There is only "the race". Accomplishments grow boring really fast. Enjoy the process. If you only enjoy the achievement then I have some bad news to you
you're set for misery
Science is competitive. Many people who go into science and related fields push themselves very hard to achieve. One of the most challenging things for me as I move through career stages has been comparing myself to others. 1/
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Pulling Needles and Getting ready to microinject and torture Archaea!
@MBLPhys
@sutter_instrmnt
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One hot tip to students: always ask for 1-1 feedback. Always. No matter the circumstances. Not important if it's for a course, rotation, quals, thesis committee, or paper/fellowship. (1/3)
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Join us and enjoy a number of perks such as debates on:
-do bacteria really have cytosleleton?
-what does hold plant cell shape is really microtubules?
-what's the newest actin labeling probe and why it still sucks
-What does endocytosis really do in yeast
And much more...
The program of the Plant and Microbial Cytoskeleton GRC is online:
Lots of opportunities for short talks!
Re-tweet and submit your abstracts!
#cytoskeleton
#actin
#microtubules
#septins
#yeast
#plants
#bacteria
#archaea
#protists
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As "new" to the Archaea community, it was so good to see how this commujity engages in passionate but respectful and kind discussions.
Heads up to trainees exploring their place in academia: that's where tou want to land. Where people collaborate and cooperate.
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Very nice blurb about our multi-lab collab work on the identification of multiple morphogensis factors in archaea.
Grateful that our humble contribution helped this work to be in the highlight list of Nat Comm
Deconstructing the structural elements of a lesser-known microbe
Researchers study
#archaea
, single-cell microorganisms, to discover how proteins determine what shape a cell will take & how that form may function
@pohlschr
@Archaeon_Alex
@schulze_lab
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And that's why science needs to reach everyone, not only the same old faces from in person meetings. Can you imagine discuss your ideas with geniuses like Malick?
The story of Malick Ndiaye, the 13-year-old Senegalese boy who made a functional telescope out of myopic glasses, a camera lens, wire, paper and cans [read more: ]
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Really sad I couldn't make to GRC
#archaea
but could spend well my time playing the very first archaeal microfluidic marble game.
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If you're looking for a PhD program in Cell Bio, Brandeis MCB is an awesome place! Applications due Dec 1st
Students are guaranteed funding, stipend of $35K, full tuition, and health insurance.
You might even have fun imaging some weird microscopic bugs with us!
Please RT
Applying for PhD programs? Love Boston? Watch our video to request fee waivers and see why Brandeis is a nurturing, collaborative, interdisciplinary place for Biochemistry/Biophysics, MCB, or Neuroscience PhDs!
@BrandeisNeuro
@BrandeisMCB
@BrandeisScience
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I have no words.
Seriously. I will still try to respect you if you publish Nature, but it's going to be damn hard. It got to a breaking point.
Open access publishing is advantageous to authors and to society as a whole. More importantly, open access publishing is the right thing to do.
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getting ready to work on this story spearheaded by
@venturajp_
from Embrapa-Brazil on a set of new archaeal species with unprecedented roles in plant survival! And of course, with unique new morphological traits! Nature is full of incredible new discoveries waiting for us.
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Archaea know better than become pathogenic. They are just waiting to finish us all at once.
Methanogenic
#Archaea
are responsible for the biggest mass extinction event in the last 500 million years 🌎🌋 killing ~90% of all (eukaryotic) species ....
Interesting theory 🤔
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We have a fully funded
@HFSP
project to study spatio-temporal organization of (never studied) mechanosensory receptors and signals in archaea. It's a cross-disciplinary project that will allow you to collaborate and travel between 3 labs (1/3)
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There are so many cool ongoing projects (and many just waiting for someone to arrive). Particle tracking and microrheology are some of the cool stuff happening:
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@joachimgoedhart
It's a fair description ;)
These are haloarchaeal cells and their division machinery:
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Watching this for the past hour
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Now I can see why we have to write grants. My house would be an eternal mess without grant writing.
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sciTwitter, what's the current best split-FP for protein-protein interactions in your opinion/experience?
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When I published my first """"high impact paper"""", the frequent question was "how do you feel". My answer was and still is: nothing, all feelings came when I first made the discover, at 2am of a Monday alone in the microscope room. Nothing will ever match that. (2/2)
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I didn't foresee the spread of this. So I need to clarify a point or two. But the fact that people care about the topic shows that this should come to the public more often. Transforming anecdotes into data is important to rethink our research culture (1/5)
knowing that a friend's paper was rejected after 3 years under review at
@Nature
is just devastating. Asking for animal data that takes years and just claim "the hypothesis is not novel anymore" is low. It's irresponsible to research money spent. Reviewers also need to do better.
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that's actually pretty much the best description of a professor I've ever seen. At least fully describes how we direct our hiring decisions for TT positions. And review papers. And grants.
Senior PI giving comments on a figure made by an expert collaborator from a completely different field
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our lab just installed a glass 3D printer, now we can make our own culture flasks! (just kidding, but they are very cool shakers with coupled oxymeters!)
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