Santhosh Girirajan

Understanding the molecular diversity of synapses - Nature Reviews Neuroscience The set of proteins present at synapses determines their heterogeneous functions and properties. In this Review, van Oostrum and Schuman describe the molecular mechanisms that contribute to the d...

Understanding the molecular diversity of synapses www.nature.com/articles/s41... - molecular diversity = functional diversity!

How Is Cell Death Essential to Life? | Quanta Magazine Cells in our bodies are constantly dying — and these countless tiny deaths are essential to human health and multicellular life itself. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz speaks with cellular bi...

What a wonderful podcast interview of Shai Shaham by @stevenstrogatz.com!

I love how Shai made the case for basic science: I think science has proven over and over how discoveries that seemed unimportant and fringe at any moment turn out to be all the rage just a couple of decades later.

#Celegans

A microRNA is the effector gene of a classic evolutionary hotspot locus In Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), the genomic region around the gene cortex is a “hotspot” locus, repeatedly implicated in generating intraspecific melanic wing color polymorphisms across 100 mi...

I occasionally did little threads over at The Other Place on papers in biology that seem only to make biology sound even more complicated and arbitrary but in fact illustrate some important generic principles. So here's one.

This is the paper I’m looking at. 1/n
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This fearless science sleuth risked her career to expose publication fraud Anna Abalkina is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

This fearless science sleuth risked her career to expose publication fraud
Anna Abalkina @abalkina.bsky.social is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.
Holly Else reports at Nature.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Great story about mentorship, privilege, serendipity and more! 🧪

Very excited about this work and the potential applications of of cell-free RNA.

Diagram of our internal organs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_%28biology%29

We learn in school about the distinctive shapes of each of our body’s organs, but how did that arise? Organs self-assemble, as individual cells change shape and move in coordinated ways, sometimes with multiple cell /tissue types shaping one another 1/n 🧪

Cross-ancestry analysis identifies genes associated with obesity risk and protection Gene discoveries in obesity have largely been based on European cohorts, leading to an ancestral bias, that limits their generalizability across populations. We performed a gene-based rare variant ass...

Please check our publications posted recently:

Cross-ancestry analysis identifies genes associated with obesity risk and protection www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
Genetic modifiers and ascertainment drive variable expressivity of complex disorders
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...