Navin B. Ramakrishna

Schematics of our increasing knowledge of in vivo human primordial germ cell development, and a summary of the exciting hPGCLC maturation protocols: @dev-journal.bsky.social @biologists.bsky.social

Infertility affects ~1 in 6 people, and up to 30% of cases are unexplained. I am excited to present my postdoctoral work from @toddmacfarlan.bsky.social 's lab, now available as a preprint: tinyurl.com/yync6f2r addressing a possible role for the meiotic gene PRDM9 in infertility 🧵/1

📣 Interested in non-coding disease-causing variants? Check out our review "Mechanisms underlying disease-causing variants in promoters and enhancers". Interesting mechanisms, challenges and future perspectives. Great to work with @wbickmor.bsky.social, Kun and Ryan! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This Is the Biggest Obstacle to New Cancer Cures. It is much too hard for medical researchers to launch clinical trials, by @ruxandrabio.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/o... via @nytopinion.nytimes.com

For the past 30 years, “whole-genome sequencing” has been a misnomer. Today the T2T Consortium publishes a dozen papers heralding a future of truly complete genomes for humans and nearly any vertebrate 👨‍🔬🐒🐦🐀🦒🐎🫏🐹🐟 (sorry, no salamanders): www.cell.com/consortium/t... 🧵[1/15]

Podcast: Is embryo selection allowing parents to ‘build-a-baby’? bbc.com/audio/play/w...

Thank you @natgenet.nature.com for this nice Research Briefing www.nature.com/articles/s41... on our recent paper reporting live-cell measurements of Sox2 promoter bursting kinetics when varying its genomic distance from the SCR enhancer 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🎨 job alert 🐠 Come join us! We have two positions open! These are part of our @erc.europa.eu funded project on the mechanisms underpinning convergence of colour patterns in cichlid fishes! Closing date: 16th August. Postdoc: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc... Technician: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

Paying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Human embryo editing against disease is unsafe and unproven — despite rosy predictions www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Absolutely thrilled 💣 to share our preprint 🖨️: "Mapping active cis-regulatory elements from transcription initiation events”. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We introduce nucCAGE and PRIME to identify active cis-regulatory elements (CREs) and disease-associated, non-coding variants.

Meet our Preprint Editors We are pleased to welcome our first group of Preprint Editors to our editorial team, responsible for handling our 'In preprints' articles. #preprints journals.biologists.com/dev/pages/ed...

Published in @natmed.nature.com today, Stephen Mayhew, Dave Allan and David Roblin share ten lessons learned from a decade of translating science at the Crick towards health and societal impact. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper out in @cp-cellstemcell.bsky.social. We uncover unexpected complexity in how metabolism changes when the embryo implants or when stem cells exit naive pluripotency, revealing a central role for dynamic TCA cycle rewiring in cell fate decisions. www.cell.com/cell-stem-ce...

Online Now: Gut microbiota modulation of regulatory DNA elements revealed by massively parallel functional characterization Online now:

A biochemical curiosity: it is much more straightforward to go enzymatically from 5mC > T than it is to go from 5mC > C

🚨 Why can’t mammals regenerate limbs like frog tadpoles or salamanders? In our new paper in @science.org , we show that species-specific oxygen sensing acts as a gatekeeper for initiating limb regeneration 🐭🐸 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #EvoDevo

Saddened to learn of the death of Greg Hannon, a former CSHL colleague and giant of modern molecular biology www.cruk.cam.ac.uk/news/in-memo...

Super excited that our two companion papers on saturation genome editing (SGE) of RNU4-2 and discovery of a novel recessive neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) were published yesterday 🥳 SGE experiment: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Recessive NDD characterisation: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵

An interesting read: Using synthetic enhancer combinations to switch on lethal payloads only when in the correct target cancer cells. Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... News&Views: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Scientists have identified a set of genetic variants that could help to explain why responses to obesity drugs vary markedly from person to person go.nature.com/4ccK07M

Happy to share our new review on X-chromosome reactivation in the germline, just published in @biochemsoc.bsky.social Transactions! We highlight the latest discoveries on how this epigenetic mechanism unfolds during mammalian germline reprogramming. Hope you enjoy the read 😊

🔥 How does CTCF shape enhancer–promoter communication? In our new preprint, we systematically test how the position and orientation of CTCF binding sites (CBSs) influence gene regulation at the mouse Sox2 locus. 🧪 full paper can be found here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Some good, critical questions by Hannah Fry @fryrsquared.bsky.social here! www.youtube.com/watch?v=--CP...

Integrated small and long RNA sequencing reveals piRNA mediated transposon repression during human oogenesis www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hot off the press from the Zamore & Gainetdinov labs: Cleavage of mRNAs by a minority of pachytene piRNAs improves sperm fitness 🏊️ buff.ly/O40kIi3 #piRNA #mRNA #fertility

Friends Davor Solter and Azim Surani receiving the wonderful Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for Genomic Imprinting👏 👍 @Frankfurt Germany. With official talks from politicians using words like Education, Knowledge, Democracy 🙏 @maxplanck.de @gurdoninstitute.bsky.social

We are looking for a Postdoc to join our lab at @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social. This is a dry-lab focused post on the computational analysis of long read single-cell sequencing data to understand the role of transposable elements (TEs) in early development. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru... #TEsky

Considerations for the future of in vitro gametogenesis in fertility care - @hannahlandecker.bsky.social @uclacrshe.bsky.social @uclamcdb.bsky.social @uclastemcell.bsky.social go.nature.com/4l2e9en

Holy macaroni!!!

Happy to share our latest paper. Our findings uncover a unique chromatin architecture and spatial chromosome arrangement in gonadal germ cells and document that alongside global DNA demethylation, the germline epigenetic reprogramming involves reorganisation of the 3D genome.

Job alert! 📣 I’m looking for a research assistant to join my new team @idrm.ox.ac.uk Were using #zebrafish to understand gene-environment interactions that shape the heart 🫀generate natural diversity 🐸🐭 and contribute to congenital defects ❤️‍🩹 Full info below, and please share! 🫶🏻 bit.ly/467TO0M

📣 I'm excited to share our latest preprint! We adapt and characterise a neurosphere-based CNCC differentiation protocol, and demonstrate utility for quantitative phenotyping and craniofacial disease modelling! 🧫 Read about Array-CNCC here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @uoe-igc.bsky.social

Array-CNCC: precise aggregation and arrayed plating facilitate quantitative phenotyping of human cranial neural crest cells and craniofacial disease modelling https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.18.696654v1

Issue 12 is complete! Cover: Members of BiO's community, including a founding Editor, past & present Editors-in-Chief, our academic Editors and some of the reviewers from BiO's Fast & Fair peer review initiative. We would like to thank them all. bit.ly/4piig6y

Interested in the unexpected? How about a link between piRNAs and maternal histone mRNAs … Great collab with @sebastianfalk.bsky.social, @koenig-lab.bsky.social and Florian Steiner. #piRNA #histone #mRNA #maternal #RNAbiology #RNASky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our paper on the newest version of the Registry of candidate cis-Regulatory Elements (cCREs) is out 🧬 Huge thanks to the many collaborators, experimentalists, analysts and software developers who made this work possible — truly a team effort! A "meme-torial" of the science is coming soon 👀

This went under the radar but answers a fundamental question in Epigenetics... From many hundreds of olfactory receptor genes, each neuron selects expression of only single one (near-randomly). How? Outstanding work from Mathieu Boulard and colleagues www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Helping the next generation of scientists find their voice. 📣 Discover how @seahsamantha.bsky.social empowers students through her path from preLights to Executive Editor of the Journal of Emerging Investigators. Interview: prelights.biologists.com/news/from-pr...

I don't think scientists should work for anyone else. They should work for discovery and for their own curiosity. –Maria Leptin, ERC President @marialep.bsky.social on 'The Night Science Podcast'

Another envelope protein in the human genome. Expressed in the placenta, of course.

High-quality mouse reference genomes [PacBio Long Read genomes of 17 strains] reveal the structural complexity of the murine protein-coding landscape, Cell Genomics. www.cell.com/cell-genomic... Genomes and annotations here: projects.ensembl.org/mouse_genomes/

🚨Reposts appreciated‼️If I had read this PhD offer five years ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second to apply 😉 Passionate about gene regulation, chromatin, and developmental biology? Just contact @radaiglesiaslab.bsky.social at @ibbtec.bsky.social 🧬✨ #PhD #3DGenome

Research Highlight: Mouse In vitro oogenesis breaks free of the ovary www.cell.com/developmenta... @cp-devcell.bsky.social

🚀 Looking for talented PhD students! Join us in 🇸🇬 Singapore for 1-2 years to push the frontiers of AI for Genomics. Work on: 🧬 Cancer genome reconstruction 🧫 Cancer genome & cell foundation models 💊 RNA drug & mRNA therapeutic design #AI #Genomics #PhD 1/5

Learn more in the open access Nature Genetics paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are recuiting two new Associate Professors here in Oxford Biochemistry. Come join us! Reach out to me if you have any questions. Please repost! tinyurl.com/mr3m7bd3

A TE insertion controls throat colour in wheatears. The gene involved (ASIP) is the same one that is epigenetically affected by an IAP insertion the famous Avy mice. As if we needed more reasons to love TEs.

The quest to make babies with lab-grown eggs and sperm. An excellent news feature by Nature: tempered optimism, with critical caveats underscored. And great to see commentary from so many names in the field! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The 'Handler genome' of OSCs, a rare and stably growing cell line that runs a piRNA pathway to silence transposons. Dominik (@86dominik.bsky.social) assembled the genome of this Drosophila cell line. Besides making some cool findings, the goal was to turn this into useful resource for the field.

Read ‘Sperm sequencing reveals extensive positive selection in the male germline’ from @sangerinstitute.bsky.social and collaborators in @nature.com below: nature.com/articles/s41...