Fillip Port

Make your gene knockouts more efficient with multiplexed Cas12a sgRNAs. Our new paper is out now, with tools available from @addgene.bsky.social , www.plasmids.eu and @vdrc-flies.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #CRISPR #geneediting #Drosophila 🧪🧬✂️🔬🪰 Summary 🧵 below.

Nice thread of #histsci, shame about white supremacist Elon Musk still being a fellow.

Thrilled to share my freshly "baked" Baker lab paper. We took a bottom-up approach to designing transcriptional regulators. Instead of relying on natural activation domains, we designed compact proteins that recruit specific cofactors. Activators for now, repressors to come!

#bikecommute #Heidelberg #nofilter

I'm excited to share our new preprint: Generation of a transgenic cephalopod tinyurl.com/pc86jxz8 Cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus & squid) are crazy critters that dynamically camouflage to their surroundings by changing the color, pattern, & texture of their skin, which they control w their brain.

How are mRNAs linked to molecular motors in mammalian cells? In our new preprint, we show that FXR1/2 are RNA adaptors for the microtubule motor dynein. Our findings have also prompted us to rethink how activating adaptors contribute to motor-based transport (1/n)

This incident @nikonsmallworld brings to mind rules we set for the Drosophila Image Award in 2004. We didn't want to reward pretty pictures generated for their own sake, but celebrate the amazing images that emerge from everyday science, where beauty and discovery are inseparable. 1/2

Super excited to share my postdoctoral work at @imbavienna.bsky.social @viennabiocenter.bsky.social - We discovered that some retrotransposons, or "jumping genes" 🧬, are able to spread from cell to cell via a new viral infectivity route. A short thread: 🧵👇 (1/7)

The planet of the cells. 🔬🧪🔭

ʙɪɴᴅᴄʀᴀꜰᴛ2 is out, and we're not waiting for the paper. The full code drops today, free for academic and industry use. We're releasing it early so you can start designing right now, and bring its full power to the current Adaptyv competition. github.com/PacesaLab/Bi...

21627 applications. Nothing to celebrate here. Impossible to evaluate fairly & safely. Neither the science (too diverse & possibly LLM generated) nor the soft criteria (likely LLM generated). Without an interview stage - a security risk! marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/ne...

So proud of my lab mate @sagrill.bsky.social (whose on the job market 👀) for this magnum opus from @remlehmann.bsky.social lab @whiteheadinstitute.bsky.social ScRNA-seq of 🪰 germ cells reveals new biology, answers age old questions, and proposes new paradigms! 1/8 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Dreaming of a career in cancer research? Join the International PhD Program at @DKFZ — Germany’s largest biomedical research center. Explore #cancerresearch including #cancerbiology, #bioinformatics, #epidemiology & #medicalphysics. The Winter Selection is open now 👉 apply t1p.de/hl56b

"In Drosophila, genetics feels like solving a mathematical problem: the rules are well established that you can often predict the outcome. And then I started working with zebrafish, and I remember thinking ‘wow, this organism is a mess!’." 😂 🐝 would love to have you back @bellecmaelle.bsky.social

Several FlyBase services are down. Probably just a glimpse of what it's like to work with most other genomes, but can't say I'm enjoying the experience. Please send decorated FASTA... 😭😭😭

Milan Lab is recruiting a new PhD student. Deadline: October 30th. Please, spread the news. www.irbbarcelona.org/en/careers/y...

I wrote this quickly at a bus stop and didn't realize it would go viral, or else I would have worded it better. But the point is that the media is too credulous about AI killing everyone in 10 years (how?) when climate change is killing people now and will only get worse (we know exactly how).

Delighted to introduce KELPE: mESCs with two insulated genomic landing pads, which we use to generate new synNotch and PUFFFIN neighbour-labelling lines. They were named after kelpies, creatures from Scottish folklore, and they look pretty on a kelpie micropattern! #DevBio #SynBio

Sorry, as much as I believe the overall message, this graph is very weird. What is the difference between "almost never" and "once or twice per year"??? A big drop in performance when using AI once or twice per year or month seems very unlikely.

💯! But it worries me how widespread the notion is that AI can essentially replace experiments & just work with the data we have now. AI approaches have enormous potential for genomics but only if they go hand in hand with much more high quality data we will need to generate to feed the models.

We are recruiting a PhD student 🥼🙋 Topic: how germ cells bend gene expression dogmas Fly genetics + proteomics + genomics. Fully funded. Aarhus University 🇩🇰 info on the project and how to apply👇 mbg.au.dk/en/peter-and... I'd really appreciate it if you'd help spread the word. Thanks

Great day for doomscrolling aficionados.

Did you know that the cells of old animals contain much less mRNA than the cells of young ones? Let me share with you some results from an ongoing project in the lab, where we are finding that a progressive depletion of total mRNA abundance is a crucial part of aging 1/22

Cool holiday moment on the way to the beach. Main BBC News on the radio: "In a scientific breakthrough scientist have mapped all connections in a fly brain." 🐝💪🏼 @jefferis.bsky.social @ribeirocarlitos.bsky.social @mmcosta.bsky.social @mrclmb.ac.uk Finally some pos news. Beach was also great.

Now out in Annu Rev Cancer Biol: "Beyond Mice and Men." We think of cancer as a disease of humans, as well as pets 🐈‍⬛ 🐕 & lab mice. But cancer is found across the animal tree of life, including clams and fruit flies. Comparative oncology has a lot to teach us. 🧵 www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Looking for model organism resources to follow on Bluesky? Here's a starter pack for you! go.bsky.app/Npxsd7h

Po, Rhein, Loire 2026.

Interested in using #Drosophila genetics & advanced imaging combined with modeling to study inter-organ transport and epithelial dynamics? We’re hiring a #PhD student @uni-muenster.de, based at the Multiscale Imaging Center and @sfb1348.bsky.social Graduate School. Apply here tinyurl.com/ypx74a5d

Why do you need an additional room for your lab? Well, the two cells we expanded last week completely fill our existing lab and we need a third replicate...

Exclusive from Jason Mast and Brian Yang at @statnews.com who write "the disclosure raises concerns about the quality and transparency of China’s more lightly regulated pathway for drug trials." www.statnews.com/2026/08/05/c...

🤯 Wow, this looks great. The combination of a sophisticated genetic toolbox and available connectome is so powerful for figuring out how animals do what they do. 🧪🪰

It's not often single author primary research papers are published in our field & it's even rarer when the author is a Nobel Prize winner Check out the new work by Eric Wieschaus in @dev-journal.bsky.social Flattening maternal gradients in Drosophila embryo journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

🚩 My 2010 PhD thesis is ‘70% AI’ I ran my 2010 PhD thesis through an AI detector. It flagged 70% as AI, then tried to sell me a ‘humanise’ fix. Either I am a time traveller, or these tools do not work. Link to my thesis in the comments to try yourself. #AIDetection #HigherEd 🧪 #AI

A message is being communicated, can you get it?

“Seven days after the girl’s medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the base editor into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy…” This, in @science.org, is an important and tragic story. (It’s also an incredibly well reported one.) 🧪

Join our team! The @bogdan_lab in Marburg is hiring a postdoctoral fellow and a doctoral student for studying innate cellular immune response to tumor cells and epidermal wounds in Drosophila. Apply: stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/4... stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/3...

(1/4) How is the timing of cell death regulated? We have developed a #liveimaging system to follow the dynamic cell death of #Drosophila hepatocyte-like cells (oenocytes) in intact pupae throughout metamorphosis. Watch some beautiful videos from our #preprint in this thread! #DevBio #CellDeath

Nice paper by the @hietakangaslab.bsky.social using multiplexed Cas12a mutagenesis to show that Salr acts as a negative regulator of growth and lipid storage. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

📣 📣 📣 📣 To all Drosophilists: the call for Workshop proposals at the 2027 European Drosophila Research Conference in Bonn (20-23 September 2027) is OPEN! Go to link below for instructions. Closing date: 30 September 2026. 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻 tinyurl.com/45y8trzd

Is the real issue less a guilty/not guilty verdict but - as in Tessier-Lavigne’s case - the fact this seems bound to occur in a hypercompetitive environment incentivizing fraud and a feudal system ill-equipped and disincentivized to address it?

After months of experiments, failed injections, unexpected results, and those rare moments when everything suddenly works - our manuscript is finally submitted. Read our newest story about a journey of tiny vesicles carrying big biological messages, now in bioRxiv. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

1/n What fraction of the human genome is essential for cells? Excited to share our preprint that explores this question by combining an unusual CRISPR system, phage promoters, and thousands of deletion launchpads. @sudpinglay.bsky.social @jshendure.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fantastic recruitment for our local genome engineering scene. Welcome back to Heidelberg Jonas!

Our Bachelor student Lara has lot's of talents beyond lab work (unfortunately forgot to take a picture of the amazing cake she made).

Our latest manuscript on (Harry Potter and) the effect of elevated temperature on embryonic development in flies. Even a small increase in temperature causes developmental defects, indicating problems in the face of global warming! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How your email finds me (not). #outofoffice #dolomites

Has anyone already claimed their money back they paid for fraudulent products?

1/8 🚨 New preprint from the @sternberglab.bsky.social & @martinjinek.bsky.social labs! CRISPR-associated transposases (CASTs) insert large DNA cargoes at precise genomic locations — no double-strand breaks needed.

"Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating scientific output, but risks narrowing inquiry, weakening judgement and undermining how scientists are trained" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Got an obnoxious little finding you'd otherwise shelve? We did our first @micropub7n.bsky.social and it was a 10/10 experience! Find out why you should use caution if deploying Repo-GeneSwitch-Gal4 for investigating fly sleep. Led by @seakelly5.bsky.social & @keisukefukumura.bsky.social