Jamie Heather

That column on the far right is the death of American biomedical science.

🚀 Registration is now OPEN for AIRR Community Meeting VIII: Decoding and Recoding Immunity! Join us June 8–11, 2026 at Yale University (USA) or attend virtually. 💸 Early-bird rates available until April 15! 🔗 Register: tinyurl.com/airrcmeeting8

#AIRRC8 #immunosky

You ever look at the human TCR gamma chain locus and ask why the constant region's so silly? It's doing stuff! www.science.org/doi/full/10....

(Very gratified to see this, having once spent an afternoon making my tool stitchr make sure it can handle the different TRGC isoforms, now feels justified)

This won’t come as a surprise to the TCR-antigen gurus, but I did want to share some lessons we learned re: partial TCR sequence alignments as predictions for antigen specificity from this study 1/

As mentioned in another thread, four UKRI leaders spoke to journalists this morning about changes to research council funding

They addressed stories broken by RPN that STFC has to find £162m of costs savings by 2029-30, and that major physics infrastructure projects have been shelved

...

Update from MRC re funding

My brain tried to read this like a Lou Bega song

image of the OpenFlexure Microscope on the left. On the right, our adapted live-cell imaging openflexure microscope with cradle to negate vibrations inside an existing incubator

Unleashing live-cell imaging for the masses!
Adapting the OpenFlexure Microscope for Affordable Live-Cell Imaging www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Fits into existing incubators for time-lapse experiments & feeds into existing bioimaging analysis pipelines.
Thanks @wellcometrust.bsky.social funding

Antibody escape drives emergence of diverse spike haplotypes resembling variants of concern in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections Snell et al. develop sequencing methodology to identify full-length spike haplotypes and show that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections drive divergent haplotype emergence, accelerating viral evolution an...

This is finally out.

Very short take home. All the variation in spike that produced the immune escape characteristics of Omicron can occur in one single persistently infected individual over the period of a year.

This is why persistent infections matter

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

I have a 3-year postdoc position available at University of Manchester for a mass spec expert in proteomics. The person will be involved in exciting projects in single cell proteomics, drug discovery and innate immunity - on timsTOF Ultra AIP & HF & Astral Zoom.

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQJ093/r...

There is a cost to science denial.

This should be a source of great national shame, and a spur to action.

I sadly suspect it will be neither.

Delighted that our latest paper is out at @mucosalimmunol.bsky.social. Here, using bronchoscopies and scRNA- and TCR-seq, we found that T cells isolated from bronchoalveolar lavage versus the airway mucosal are surprisingly distinct. Summary of the original preprint below. #Immunology #PCCM

Assuming this is the right one: www.boom-power.co.uk/content/uplo... ...

... looks like these panels have their axis ~2m off the ground, so the tops of the panels will be that height at sunset/sunrise, when they're at maximum tilt.

Me before: "this is fun but silly"

Me after: "I think there's something to this you know"

Is that one sheet stuck to the shaker, with matching cutouts stuck to the bottom of the clamps? Looks like a decent bit of force applied - can you go faster, or do they start to move around? (Wondering what stuff I can start to magnet together)

Death rates rise when NHS cuts back on nursing Using lower-paid workers to plug the gaps left by a failure to hire registered nurses damages safety, new research has shown

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: English hospitals that cut registered nurses saw more deaths while those hiring nurses saw more patients survive. Even when hospitals tried to fill gaps with non-nurses, deaths still went up. Major new study exposes dangerous NHS variation:
www.thetimes.com/article/7eed...

A copilot button has appeared in all of my work Office programs, without need, want, or license, and without any way to get of it. Not only does IT not have a clue why it's there, no Microsoft resource can explain how to remove it.

At least Clippy had the decency to get lost when you told him to.

If my surname was Quot I'd definitely consider Alastair / Ally as a first name

Not that I'm in the market, but I'm curious what the (non-chomping) alligator risk is?

May be of interest to note that the US practice of advertising prescription meds to end consumers is seen as pretty odd by a large fraction of the world, where it tends to be much more regulated.

It was certainly one of my unexpected culture shocks when I first arrived!

The annual realisation that no, it's not that all of the appliances' wiring has gone faulty at once, but that your winter thermals have turned you into a walking Van de Graaff generator

If you ever need to fuzzy search some DNA, sassy is your tool.

Please spread the word; I think many people just outside my own circle could benefit from this :)

cc @rickbitloo.bsky.social

github.com/RagnarGrootK...

My nan always said, if you aint delving too deep you aint delving deep enough

a life changing opportunity made possible by the Nobel Prize funds awarded to John Sulston -- the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social runs the Sanger Prize scheme, open to an undergrad from any LMIC to spend 3 months here learning all about genomics. more details here www.sanger.ac.uk/about/study/...

This isn't *why* we should encourage scientists to have interests outside of the lab (they are their own reward), but it's an excellent demonstration of the inspiration that can happen when you do

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

A photo of 3d printed labware, of a stacked rack of 96 well format tip tubes used as PCR tube/strip holders, sliding into the drawer-like printed rack.

A photo of 3d printed labware, showing a printed rack for QIAgen midiprep clearance columns resting on top of a recycled tip box for liquid collection.

A photo of 3d printed labware, being a custom device for cutting strips out of agar plates (for plating multiple samples on one plate), next to a demonstrate plate that has been chopped into eighths.

A short gif of 3d printed labware, being a custom device for pressing into an agar plate to remove a thin strip (to facilitate plating of multiple samples on one plate).

Just realised I haven't shared some of my favourite recent functional 3d printed labware designs on here. While the PCR tube/strip rack one is undoubtedly the one I use most, I still love the agar plate divider best.

All available @ www.thingiverse.com/jamimmunolog...

#labrats #science #3dprinting

Deep profiling of human T cells defines compartmentalized clones and phenotypic trajectories across blood and tonsils Human T cell responses are often studied using blood, yet most T cells reside in tissues. By comparing T cell receptor repertoires from millions of T cells from autologous tonsils and blood, Sureshcha...

We are #absolutely #thrilled to #present @cp-immunity.bsky.social - Deep profiling of human T cells defines compartmentalized clones and phenotypic trajectories across blood and tonsils: Immunity www.cell.com/immunity/ful...