Harmit Singh Malik

@harryboschquote.bsky.social : Everybody counts or nobody counts

Our recent work on #Cellularization of the #ichthyosporean S. arctica is finally out in its final form @lsajournal.org www.life-science-alliance.org/content/10/1... Congrats to @margaridaaraujo.bsky.social @hiralshah.bsky.social @gautamdey.bsky.social & the rest of the team

Current Anarchy has a nice ring to it...

Amen to this. My way of phrasing this is to remind students that “biology is a science of exceptions.” For any new principle one may discover, there’s probably some life form out there that breaks your rule and does things differently. Good luck training an AI model on exceptions.

He is so close to getting it

Not all nuclei are the same. We went to some of biology’s most exceptional nuclei 👉 dinoflagellates with genomes 80× ours 👉 Giardia’s twin nuclei 👉 ciliates carrying two nuclei in one cytoplasm & asked a simple question: what sets nuclear density? 🧵 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The U.S. is the only major economy where planet-warming pollution has increased dramatically in the last year.

This is literally right out of the Lord of the Rings

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

This looks very interesting to clean up alignments: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Antique folding camp table uses an accordion-scissor leg mechanism that expands and locks into a sturdy tabletop that folds away for storage. IG: @antique vintage_rust

The @neal-lab.bsky.social taking a break from the daily grind to reconnect and reflect on our lab’s values! Since day one, our annual retreat has been a time to work on IDPs, set goals, and grow together. A much-needed reset to kick off the academic year!

Soup of the day: Chili cheese fries

Obama on Trump's construction projects: "What's up with the gold? He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory"

Accompanying the publication of my second PhD paper today, I wrote a little bit about the behind the scenes. How did this project come about? Inspiration can come from many unexpected places. I’m so grateful that Scott and Matt gave me the opportunity to follow my passion and curiosity!

Okay, first, this is good advice. The risk of botulinum poisoning nothing to dismiss. But if you read this warning statement, it's also will remind you of how thing our food safety net is at the moment. The FDA asked the company to recall the risky product and they refused. 1/2

Stoked for this GRC and also for the corresponding GRS June 12-13, co-chaired by @meganbehrmann.bsky.social and myself. Will be an excellent meeting for students and postdocs in functional evolutionary genetics working in diverse model systems! More to come here: www.grc.org/molecular-me...

Incredibly excited about our latest work on R-bodies, 5+ years in the making! These coiled protein ribbons extend into ~10 µm needles in a pH-dependent manner & we caught them springing open inside amoebae after P. aeruginosa gets eaten. (animation: Jegg Yoon)🧵1/2 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Celebrating Catherine DuLac’s Pearl Meister Greengard Prize at Rockefeller with Catherine and Charles Gilbert

So many excellent pumpkins at this year’s carving contest! Congratulations to the Henikoff Lab for most humorous, the @harmitmalik.bsky.social Lab for most horrific, the Srivastava Lab for most artistic and the @suebiggins.bsky.social Lab for most scientific!

No-one knows how yeast take up DNA in transformations. Really! (Ok, endocytosis is required.) We noticed that "yeast transformation mix" w/ Lithium salts, PEG, carrier DNA ... is exactly the mix that chemists use to make DNA phase separate. Our review paper in Yeast Journal! w/ Alistair Elfick 1/

My quote of the day Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time. We live today in an era of discovery that far outshadows the discoveries of the New World five hundred years ago. Michael Crichton

I have also given up on managing ‘my own emotions’ in professional environments: my question to others is how are you so calm in the midst of … all this. Intriguingly, this has cut down on my committee invites.

Also dogs do not have existing genetic and behavioural problems due to inbreeding, which cloning definitely won't exacerbate

I am so excited for this conference. A stellar line-up of incredible researchers across disciplines, a beautiful location, and a great environment for younger scientists. And what a treat that I get to co-organize this with @levine-lab.bsky.social! www.grc.org/molecular-me...

Calling all rising undergrad juniors & seniors: 9 weeks, mentorship from top scientists, up to $15K stipend to support "the most incredible" summer research experience. Want to learn more? Register for our live, #CechFellows webinar 10/26, 4pm ET! ➡️ bit.ly/4zKhIM8 | Program page: bit.ly/4dRWYJZ 🧪

#HHMIInvestigator Harmit Malik & team @fredhutch.org thrive on competition — between genomes, that is. These researchers study how viruses & proteins rapidly evolve to keep up with their foes, uncovering insights that could inform the development of new antivirals: bit.ly/3U5yQNq.

Many of the people who built and ran Jurassic Park did not survive the movie. I don't know why that factoid just popped into my head today. I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with current events.

Lung tumors mis-splice STAT2, a key immune gene, building a broken form that actively jams the signal rather than staying quiet. That splicing glitch associates with immunotherapy response. 🧵 #RNAbiology #RNAsky #RNAsplicing #cancer #immunotherapy @jax.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share our preprint! “Genome-scale base editing reveals the functional effects of variants in yeast” Using high-throughput base editing, we measured the growth effects of 308,461 variants, identifying 18,009 with significant effects. #Genomics #CRISPR 1/8 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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!

It's Philip K. Dick's world; we just have the misfortune to live in it.

This week, NIH advisors rebuked RFK for harming #NIH and US science. Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported it. Then RFK posted calling her sources anonymous or corrupt. I'll say this hoping it does good: I'm an NIH scientist, I'm not anonymous, and RFK Jr is destroying NIH. More in attachment:

Just in time for Halloween, we've posted a new preprint on zombie deubiquitinases! As it turns out, standard #DUB catalytic mutants aren't truly dead - they've just become zombies that are still capable of removing noncanonical, ester-linked #ubiquitin signals...

1/n Crossover episode! We just released RFD4-Proteina, our latest protein design model - and the result of a year-long collaboration between the Baker Lab and NVIDIA GenAIR (the name says it all…). I hope you’ll agree - the results are astonishing. 🌐 Website: rfd4-proteina.org

I just published: What scientists miss when they don’t read patents Why my lab reads patents to understand plant immunity, and the wiki we built so you can too. kamounlab.medium.com/what-scienti...

My department at UCSF (Cell & Tissue Biology) is recruiting for a tenure-track Assistant/Associate Professor studying the fundamental cell biology underlying disease. Join us! App due Dec 1. aprecruit.ucsf.edu/JPF06272

Haven't used this is in a while, but a new paper from the group is a good excuse. This is monster of a paper from Sebastian Kaiser about the evolution of non-ribosomal peptides. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What happens when we pair HIV-1 and HTLV-1 CA subdomains in vitro? A new preprint by Mathias Percipalle from our lab provides an answer: Retroviral CA subdomains encode their immature assembly properties independently of strict subdomain co-pairing doi.org/10.64898/202... 👀Take a look!👀

From MBoC: What helps cells stay connected as they move together to shape tissues? A Drosophila study identified 22 genes involved in testis morphogenesis and uncovered new roles for Par-1 and RN-tre in cell migration and tissue organization. https://www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/mbc.E26-05-0234