Benjamin Weekley, PhD

Today in @ScienceTM, we report the use of in vivo adenine base editing to correct a variant causing Dravet syndrome, a severe childhood epilepsy and neurodevelopmental disorder, substantially ameliorating disease symptoms and extending lifespan in an animal model. 1/13 drive.google.com/file/d/12rcxew…

Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out now @Nature , we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster, but at a cost.🧵 #neuroscience nature.com/articles/s4158… Open link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

🎉Please join us in congratulating Dr. Alberto Corona on receiving the 2026 #FriedmanBrainInstitute Postdoc Innovator Award. The #KennyLab's @Mr_Beto_Corona is an extraordinarily rigorous young neuroscientist whose work is among the most innovative & compelling. CONGRATULATIONS👏

1/ Excited to share that TranscriptFormer is now published in Science. We trained a generative foundation model on 112 million cells across 12 species spanning ~1.5 billion years of evolution. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Delighted to have contributed to this work from the impressive lab of Dr. Ben Garcia! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

👏PLEASE JOIN US in WELCOMING Dr. Richard Drexler as Assistant Professor in the #BrainBodyResearchInstitute, #NashNeuroscience & the #FriedmanBrainInstitute. We are thrilled that Dr. @RDrexler_ is joining us; Welcome to the lab!✨🔬

Our preprint for de novo DNA binder design is out! biorxiv.org/content/10.648…. The punchline: methods have gotten good enough that we can find sequence specific DNA binding proteins from screening as few as 96 designs per target.

TOMORROW! On Tuesday, May 5th, 3pm, hosts @PaulKennyPhD, Dr. Ming-Ming Zhou and Dr. Mone Zaidi welcome @Yale's Dr. @CraigMCrews who will give a Special Seminar concerning one of the most exciting areas in drug discovery research today. In-Person - Hatch Auditorium. NOT TO MISS!

Nature Human Behaviour から "How to design effective scientific figures" というコメンタリーが出ました🎉参考になれば幸いです！！ nature.com/articles/s4156… @NatureHumBehav

🆕 review with @jp_unfried out in @NatureSMB 🧐. Direct roles of lncRNAs in transcriptional activation. What do we understand about how lncRNAs lure Pol2 and set the stage for RNA production, and what do we still miss? nature.com/articles/s4159…

Programmable artificial RNA condensates in mammalian cells: nature.com/articles/s4156…

🚨Prime editing breakthrough (April 29, 2026) Researchers at UMass Chan Medical School have developed “Prime Assembly”: a method to insert large DNA fragments (up to 11 kb) with high precision and without double-strand breaks in the genome. They use two pegRNAs plus linear donor templates that assemble inside the cell. It works in quiescent cells and has already been demonstrated by inserting full genes such as dystrophin and CARs. Prime Assembly (PA) perfectly complements their platform and PASSIGE technology for large insertions, opening the door to more indications (DMD, allogeneic CAR-T, etc.) with lower risk. Another step that reinforces why prime editing remains the most versatile gene-editing technology. Source: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Our paper with Vijay Ramani is out today in @Nature. We show that chromatin has a richer grammar than simple "open" or "closed" DNA. Using IDLI, we read 14 nucleosome structural states across single chromatin fibers and find that this grammar is actively written by transcription factors.

April is #GraduateStudentAwareness Month and we are proud to highlight Rasika Iyer, a PhD student @themazelab !👏Beyond the lab, as Co-President of @SinaiNeuro & a leader at Mount Sinai’s GEMS, Rasika is a dedicated advocate for science outreach & education in #NYC! WOW!💯

We’re told to “eat a diverse diet”—but how diverse is it in reality? Over 2 weeks: • Lowest 10% consume ~20 unique items • Highest (novelty seekers) reach ~86 Interesting twist: women tend to sample more unique foods than men. Where do you fall? @NatMetabolism

I'm genuinely enjoying working on what will be my SnapGene replacement software. Chiseling away toward my freedom is uniquely exciting and I can promise the software will be maintained...bc I'm using it daily. Aiming for a May 24th release date of v1.0.0 github.com/Binomica-Labs/…

Excited to share our latest study in @NatureComms where we uncover a new mechanism of chromatin regulation that is essential in certain SWI/SNF-mutant cancers. Congrats to @HaydenMalone3 and coauthors! #SWISNF #cancer (1/8) @stjuderesearch @stjudegraduate nature.com/articles/s4146…

Our paper is out in @ScienceMagazine Here we describe how stem cell retain epigenetic inflammatory memory long-term. Full text in the link below! Congratulations @chris_cowley14 @SairajSajjath @LFSoto12 and everyone else involved! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

TOMORROW👉March 27! DON'T MISS @UCLA_BRI's Dr. Zachary Zeidler when he JOINS #MSNSeminars. Hosted by Drs. Ruthie Wittenberg, Brian Kipp & @BenjaminWeekley, @BrainofZedZed presents: The Architecture of Recall: Cell Type-Specific Recruitment During Brain-Wide Memory Consolidation.

Announcing the winners for the "Fast Biology Bounties." I ended up giving away ~$15,000 for 20 projects after reading 430 submissions from 335 individuals. Many winners were "highly generative," meaning they sent me 3-5 excellent ideas and were glad to have them shared freely and openly. There were some major failure modes, too. Some ideas surfaced repeatedly, but I didn't do a good job of connecting "like-minded" people. I'll fix this next time. Also, I managed everything manually using my personal email. This was tedious, and I'm working on building a platform that will automate a lot of this. I'd like to send feedback and scores for every submission in future contests. Many more details in my blog post, which breaks down all the numbers, what I learned, and highlights some of the winners. Some people who I gave money to: - Sebastian Cocioba for a laser-based PCR thermocycler, in which infrared heating replaces aluminum blocks. - Bryan Duoto for writing and publishing a colony-to-sequence cloning workflow that uses magnetic beads and Nanopore sequencers. Scientists can verify clones in 1–3 hours instead of waiting overnight. - Jeff Nivala for an idea to synthesize proteins directly from DNA, without relying on any RNA intermediates. - Sierra Bedwell for a clever automation system that uses off-the-shelf parts to screen thousands of environmental DNA samples in parallel. - Xavier Bower for "IceCreamClone," an interactive cloning strategy ranker that looks at a scientist’s available “parts,” or sequences, and then determines whether they ought to use Gibson, Golden Gate, restriction digest, or another strategy to assemble them together. The software also catches likely cloning errors and estimates the cost and time required for each option. - Andres Arango for multiple ideas, including using antifreeze to accelerate DNA ligation by 2-3 orders of magnitude, and an idea for computationally designed protein cradles for expressing membrane proteins in E. coli.