Stirling Churchman

I'm thrilled to see the cover of @NatureSMB this month! My sibling Leidy Churchman made this special painting to illustrate our latest work on the packaging of mitochondrial DNA. Both works are nicely described in the "Musings on art and science" editorial nature.com/articles/s4159…

11/ Together, our results suggest that SRSF1 coordinates splicing, transcription, and 3′-end processing to shape mRNA isoform identity. Thanks to @anafiszbein and team for their help! Read the preprint here: biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

10/ These effects also appear relevant beyond cell lines. In breast cancer tumors, lower SRSF1 levels are associated with more distal alternative last exon usage, consistent with what we observe after SRSF1 depletion.

1/ Preprint alert 🚨🚨🚨 How do cells decide where an mRNA should end? And how is that decision coordinated with splicing and transcription while the RNA is still being made? Here's what first author @HopeMerens found 👇

@genologos @anshulkundaje Seemed pretty sketch! Sorry you were hacked!

Dear Followers, my account was hacked. I apologize if you received a phishing DM from me. If you clicked the link and provided your login credentials, contact X support ASAP.

@baym the female-led research team who built the model wanted to honor our scientist idol, what do you suggest as a better name? :)

@OdedRechavi Incremental at best

Reviewer #2: “The aims are not well defined and the impact is unclear, what specific question is being addressed?"

@OdedRechavi AI is great at day science, but I have yet to see AI do night science well. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… @ItaiYanai

I suspect (and I’m certainly not alone) that science without humans will be limited. I’m not sure AI scientists would pursue the same questions humans do, especially those driven by curiosity rather than immediate practicality. Plus, there's something really sad about science-without-scientists, it's like art-without-artists. Whether it's wishful thinking or not, the AI I want is AI that helps scientists, not AI that replaces them.

@lizbwood Sounds very cool, looking forward to reading the paper, but why do you have a picture of a black hole??

Our paper on variational synthesis is out now in Nature Biotechnology. Manufacturing-aware generative models — AI architectures that know how to physically build their own designs — enabling synthesis of DNA encoding ~10^16 AI-designed proteins at a cost that would be roughly a quadrillion dollars using conventional methods.

Today we report single-cell APEX-seq (scAPEX-seq) — a new method for unbiased mapping of *subcellular* transcriptomes at single-cell resolution. This approach reveals cell states that are not detectable by standard scRNA-seq, and enabled us to identify regulators of CAR T function that improve solid tumor killing. biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…

@KharMT @YSPTSPS @openclaw @nlw You're all in! Amazing. I won't let Tessera touch anything personal yet... Mostly because I don't trust myself to control the scope, but it will probably happen soon enough.

@YSPTSPS @fiddle @openclaw @nlw What I really need is a spell check agent. That’s should say hub not hun

It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago so I bought myself a Mac mini and installed @openclaw Meet Tessera! If you’re wondering what a “normie” genetics professor is doing with it or want tips to get started, ask 👇 !

@KharMT @YSPTSPS @openclaw @nlw Totally agree. I couldn’t afford Opus but GPT 5.4 is really great and comes with your chat subscription. Tailscale for sure and discord. What are you using it for @KharMT?

@YSPTSPS @fiddle @openclaw @nlw You can send your agent to the gym so yes it’s absolutely just the new Pokemon go. But definitely not a reason not to try

@YSPTSPS @openclaw I almost gave up on setting it up! The key is to reach a point where you are talking to a reasonable model so the agent helps you do things. No efficiency gains yet, I'm still playing! But I see the promise and it will be instrumental. Definitely half hobby for me so far!

@fiddle @openclaw I'mm super interested. How easy/what is activation energy to setup? What have you automated that has been most impactful or provided the greatest efficiency gains? What are you using it for that you would not have expected to use it for?