Tanentzapf Lab

1. One of formative experience of grad school for me was when our lab moved across the hallway to a bigger space & I realised my research didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of science & that this actually made me love science even more. So here is a thread about that.

For academics how much time is spent & how many emails are sent just to get documents signed? If we eliminated tomorrow the need for signatures on everything what will be the -ve consequences? I strongly believe time saved & reduced cognitive load outweighs these consequences.

3. Final paragraph: "based on our data we propose the following model", have fun, be creative think big. remember this rule "you can show nothing but you can speculate anything ".

2. paragraph 2-5: make a list in point form of 4 things you showed in the paper. Each one will get a paragraph. These paragraphs will go like this: Distil finding, explain what it means to field, put in context with literature, discuss any weakness, connect to next finding

1. For lots of people the hardest part of the paper to write is the discussion. Here is a a very brief guide: Paragraph 1: is a restatements of the two or three most important conclusions (starting with "here we showed", each conclusion gets 2-4 sentences).

my hot take is that we can assess the quality of science in broad terms (are controls/experimental design/stats/techniques appropriate & properly done). But specific assessment (is it interesting/important/impactful) that determines hiring/funding/publishing? 100% subjective

it gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective)

I don't know if this says more about how small my contribution to science is compared to my cousin andy @ecochangegroup or how far chat GPT is from being a reliable tool.

On this #HolocaustMemorialDay I remember my great grandfather Jacob Klein (here in his Austro-Hungarian army veterinarian uniform in 1914). He, my great grandmother & 6 of their 8 children perished in the death camps, his daughter, my great aunt Aranka, survived auschwitz.

My fantasy is that soon we'll all have AI write our grants & then use AI to review the grants & the end result will be basically a lottery system weighted based on productivity. Which is the system we should have in the 1st place & actually have time to read & think & do science.

🎉 The Developmental Mechanics Seminar Series is back! 🗓️ Thurs, Jan 22 🎙️ Opening talks: 🧬Guy Tanentzapf (UBC)@TanentzapfLab — How cell adhesion molecules wire into the cytoskeleton 🌀Juan Manuel Gomez Elliff (EMBL)@_Pulzar — Mapping tissue mechanics with Brillouin microscopy

My advice for young scientist who are looking to "develop a brand" as the ad I just got from Cell press offers is this: Develop a brand as a careful, thoughtful, methodical scientist. A scientist who does elegant experiments w/ lots of controls & doesn't oversell their findings.

From MBoC… Strong cell attachments are critical in early development. @TanentzapfLab (University of British Columbia) shows that inside–out integrin activation helps cells survive and proliferate during early mammalian embryogenesis. molbiolcell.org/doi/full/10.10…

It used to be that best biomedical science being done was highly concentrated on the pages of Cell, Science, and Nature. But that is no longer true. The best biomedical science being done today has democratized & can be found all over the place in all kinds of journals & formats.

I love finding a paper published years ago (5, 10, 15, 20) that isn't famous or field changing or has a ton of citations but when you read it is just awesome. Like, beautifully designed & executed & written. Best part there are so many papers like that lurking in the literature.

@JSheltzer The framework of "elite" scientists is IMHO an inappropriate way of framing the issue. Discoveries come from ecosystems (fields, networks, institutes) & that's what academia does best, create ecosystems of discovery. Industry versions of that (like Bell labs) are rare exceptions.

Many incredible biomedical scientists have left academia for biotech/pharma. While also noting many caveats, I want to share the observation that among top scientists who left academia for industry, their biggest new discoveries almost always happened in academia:

Advice from having served on faculty search committees: ALWAYS list in cover letter faculty at place you are applying to whose research aligns with yours & that you could work with. At the very least it shows you're interested enough to put minimal effort to visit their webpage.

6. Overall, we conclude that inside-out integrin activation strengthens cell-ECM attachment in early mouse development which is essential for cell survival and proliferation, particularly during gastrulation.

5. However, looking again at embryos we found that activation mutants at day E7.5 of embryonic development showed increased cell death & reduced cell-proliferation.

1. New paper from our lab is now online. We asked whether the most studied mechanism of regulation cell adhesion to the ECM, integrin activation, is important for mammalian development. The answer was YES. A brief thread follows. molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/mb…