Mike Lacy

👋 Intro for new folks: I'm a scientific curator at @addgene.bsky.social. You might see my blog posts or get emails from me about depositing plasmids. Our team mainly works behind the scenes cleaning up data, making/updating webpages, and more. I'm always on the lookout for cool new science to share!

🧪 This is a free, interactive publication - and to the best our knowledge, the first - textbook on Artificial Intelligence in BioImaging, edited by the team at @aicjanelia.bsky.social. We thank all the contributors, beyond what the character limit would allow us to list here. 👇

The 5-year cancer survival rate is up to 70% SIDS deaths have decreased by over 50% 89% decline in tornado deaths All thanks to federal investment in science and OUR tax dollars at work!

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/

Likely the most important thing I've ever written — if you're an academic and the AI mania unsettles you, here's my best shot at presenting some intellectual tools that might help you articulate why. arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251

Excellent, thorough review on fluorescent protein engineering 💡 Thanks @ammgest.bsky.social and @jinzhanglab.bsky.social for capturing the state of the field and sharing these insights!

Some of my thoughts about the surge in AI-generated papers, why this feels like a completely new kind of problem, and what this means for how we evaluate science in biology. Out now in PLOS Biology: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

What do corals, community labs, and molecular biology have in common? Chromoproteins! 🌈🧬 In our latest Built to Share video, Ashley Waldron explores how scientists turned colorful proteins found in nature into tools for research, education, and bio art. Watch full video: https://twp.ai/4hwjho

Zebrafish experiment to-do list: ✅ transgenesis ✅ genome editing ✅ fluorescent imaging ✅ lineage tracing It's a busy schedule — luckily tools for each of these tasks are included in Addgene's Zebrafish Plasmid Collection! Check out these highlights:

The deadline is approaching! NIH is proposing changes to how peer review is used in funding decisions and how outcomes are reported and they want to hear from you. Comments are due by October 13! Comment here: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Winning Nobel Prizes 🤝 Sharing plasmids on Addgene

Non-invasive control of gene editing in vivo by photoswitchable Cas12f and focused ultrasound — Michael Lin, MD PhD (and read more below: bsky.app/profile/mic...) https://twp.ai/IlwVyR (5/8)

It’s been a busy week here at Addgene! Check out some of the latest research with fresh plasmids just released online. Thread 🧵👇 (1/8)

A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:

Can you name the women who have won a science Nobel prize? 🧪🔬🧬⚛️ Since the Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901, few women have been recognized in the categories of physics, chemistry & physiology or medicine. Take Nature’s quiz on female Nobel laureates here: www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Talk about a bright idea! 💡 Congrats to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel on the #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine for foundational discoveries in optogenetics. All three openly share their remarkable tools through Addgene. Explore the tools:

On this day 75 years ago, Henrietta Lacks died of aggressive cervical cancer. She left behind a husband, five children, and a sample of her cancer cells — taken without her knowledge — that had already begun to replicate independently in a lab. Thread 🧵👇 (1/8) #HenriettaLacks #HeLa #Bioethics

Looking for life sciences 🧪 faculty/staff/trainers who want science communication to be more valued w/in academia We built an NSF-funded coaching program to help you w/ #SciComm in job & award apps, promotion materials, curriculum proposals, etc. We want to help you get more respect, credit, & pay

@cellpress.bsky.social has just released an.... interesting new 'short review' on pre-implantation gene editing, in which author Cathy Tie argues for the ethical imperative of pushing for this technology. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... There are, to put it mildly, a few issues here. 1/

There’s also a huge amount of invisible labour in making research reproducible..cleaning data, documenting methods, sharing code, checking other people’s work. None of it makes for a particularly exciting headline, but it’s what makes the research usable.

I just published: How do we recognize world-class science? Not by the journal it appeared in What I told early-career researchers about prediction, rigour, failure, priors — and the tyranny of bar graphs. kamounlab.medium.com/how-do-we-re...

Two preprints both out today identifying *different* reverse transcriptase systems associated with arrays reminiscent of CRISPR/Cas, encoded by different phage. One from Anthropic and one from Stanford. Worth pointing out that the Stanford work clearly began earlier, and has more wetlab follow-up:

Today we're publishing nine #PsychAD papers across @NaturePortfolio journals, mapping 6.3M+ brain cells to study aging, disease, genetic regulation and new computational methods. Explore the PsychAD collection: nature.com/collections/... Learn more: psych-ad.org #OpenScience

🧪Today, the PsychAD Consortium published EIGHT papers across Nature journals detailing their efforts to create the largest map of the human prefrontal cortex. It's hard to overstate the amount of work here, nor the absolute treasure trove this team has created for researchers.

We now offer Transfection-Ready DNA — NGS sequence-verified plasmid DNA from Addgene, ready to go for your next transfection. Available now: https://twp.ai/4hvlbn #Plasmids #Transfection

Is there a recent review that summarises all the biggest, baddest, most mind-boggling #cryoEM structures out there? What I need is basically just 10 pages worth of "look at this crazy thing!" Suggestions welcome! 😆

Sometimes you just don't want to deal with bacteria culture and prep - Addgene now delivers DNA ready to go! 🧬🚀 Check it out: www.addgene.org/dna-service/

What happens when scientists share their materials? Faster, more reproducible research. That’s the spirit of #OpenScienceWeek, and it’s been Addgene’s mission for 20+ years. Learn more about what drives our work: https://twp.ai/4hvnqx.

We wrote a tutorial guide on voltage imaging, now out in Neuron: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nlgh3BtfH... Indicators, microscopes, and software have all advanced to the point that it's not so hard -- you can now directly watch the electrical activity of neurons in live animals or in culture.

DNA prep shouldn't be the hardest part of your experiment. Something's changing in our catalog on September 15. We can't wait to show you what's next. #Plasmids #Transfection

We love to see it! 👀 Neuro-seeER is a fluorescent reporter for tracking neuronal estrogen response dynamics in vivo. Thanks @endoeartha.bsky.social, @acara333.bsky.social, @edvanveenphd.bsky.social et al. for sharing! Learn more 👇 and find the plasmids here 🧬: www.addgene.org/browse/artic...

Hello people doing transgenics in any model, i have a question for you : in your experience, would you say that using codon- optimized sequences for your model’s trangenes is - compulsory - recommended - probably useless as long as all tRNAs are present in your model ? Thanks a lot for any hints !

Talks for early career researchers A menu of short talks on how science actually works — skills, publishing, open science, statistics, and integrity. Most grew out of blog posts. They run short by design, because the discussion afterwards is the point. kamounlab.dreamhosters.com/KamounLab_EC...

A pervasive RT–qPCR artifact inflates RNA knockdown by RNA-targeting CRISPR - Yikey Yikes! BTW, similar concerns apply to siRNAs/ASOs that are sometimes suspected to affect RT and/or PCR . So nice somebody looked into this! rdcu.be/RUYFaGa649va

Nick! Shred! Cut! Read about the latest prime editors from David Liu Broad Institute, RNA-targeted cell killing with Cas12a2 from Yang Liu @utah.edu & Doudna Lab, CoCUT&Tag chromatin mapping from Derek Janssens @vai.org, and more in our latest Hot Plasmids:

A massive update: At least ~15 companies~ are selling scientists antibodies using faked validation data. We've documented 18,000+ manipulated images on 17,000+ products sold by leading laboratory suppliers including Thermo Fisher, Abcam, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Millipore Sigma and Bio-Techne. 1/🧵

More (many more) dodgy antibody images; 15 companies now implicated. @benjplackett.bsky.social reports for C&EN: cen.acs.org/biological-c...

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... Wow, this is kind of significant. GFP or FLAG tag Coronin makes the protein relocalise more to F-actin, while endogenous proteins don't. The paper also says that Coronins dont do actin-related functions. Wonder what'd happen if the linkers for the tags are longer?

Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects www.nature.com/articles/d41... We're quietly defunding the infrastructure modern biology runs on. PomBase, FlyBase, HGNC. have faced, or facing, existential funding crises since 2024. Curation expertise, once lost, is difficult to rebuild.

Biological Databases are critical infrastructure - not projects. As so much effort is put into harnessing AI to solve all our problems, we are allowing the foundational data resources crumble. Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If you’re a PI who’s written documentation about values, expectations, or practicalities of your lab AND you don’t mind this being referenced in an upcoming article (with Christine Pfund and @weijima.bsky.social), I would ❤️ it if you shared your 📄 with us. Thanks!

Since everyone’s arguing about speed cameras, let’s keep a couple facts in mind: 1) Research show that camera enforcement is much more popular than the media implies – in suburbs as well as cities. Lesson: Don’t conflate a few angry car owners with “public opinion.” (cont'd)

For colleagues working in molecular biology labs. Do you have a 3D printer you'd recommend for printing small hardware parts?

Hmm things are never so simple. Original authors' response to the criticism here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵