Iain Johnston

If mitochondria are influenced by gravity and the moon exerts gravitational influence on large bodies of water, could the orientation and position of planetary bodies at conception affect gene expression and neurodevelopment in the growing child via mechanotransduction?

A collection of summer mitochondria and chloroplasts, along with their environments 🇳🇴

@Madam_Mito This *is* the same as our picture in journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/a…! How odd

The feedback system/easy way to understand it. Imagine two newborn cells. Cell A receives 60% of the mitochondria and produces lots of ATP, grows quickly and divides early. Cell B receives 40%/Produces less ATP, growth slows. Division waits/more mitochondria accumulate. Eventually divides with a nearly normal mitochondrial content. Energy is always just moved around and equal to 1 within the system. @PathfinderEq

Programmed energy reserve #Aging @MitoPsychoBio

@Madam_Mito @DocLarus Wait, isn't this the same as our picture in journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/a… ?

@DocLarus Anyway, this is a super interesting paper Shahaf. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

If you are in the aging field with the goal of making financial profit- then you’re probably inhibiting the real progress of the field.

Mitochondria and chloroplasts are inherited through a "bottleneck". Smaller bottleneck ➡️ more powerful segregation of DNA damage. So why don't organisms just always use a bottleneck of size 1? And what's up with paternal leakage, DUI, etc? Take a look! doi.org/10.1093/gbe/ev…

Super grateful to @RCG_Heretic (and maker @NeuroWoodworks) for this beautiful art celebrating Robert's successful PhD defence! Featuring Eqn. 15 journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/a… linking physical behaviour of mitochondria and genetic behaviour of mtDNA :-)

Tupper’s formula is a formula that represents itself when one plots all the points in the plane that satisfy it.

Today in cursed code: a computer program that plays pong by modifying its own source code. (Each frame is a new compilation). github.com/uellenberg/Ins…

@Madam_Mito Jeremy and I discuss this a fair bit. A direct, individual-level fitness influence isn't necessary for a population of nuclear encoders to emerge; e.g. this from the SI of pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39101615/. We still think there's a link to environmental challenge pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36883279/

To clarify, the intuitive argument of nuclear protection treats protection from mutational decay as an individual trait. However, it is a population-level trait that cannot impact individual-level fitness. Thus, there is no direct selective benefit for a gene to escape organellar mutation pressure; bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11… We introduce a ‘burst-upon-drift’ model to best explain nuclear-mitochondrial population genetics with flares of transfer due to genetic drift.

@mbeisen Reminiscent of a bygone age xkcd.com/1057/

If you cite your QED score to me ever - whether it's above 70 or not - I will buy you a cup of coffee and spill it on your laptop.

The majority of axonal mitochondria in mammalian neurons lack mitochondrial DNA and do not produce ATP biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

We apply it to the evolution of drug resistance in TB and Klebsiella, and show its interoperability with other problems. The link is biorxiv.org/content/10.648… ... would love to hear thoughts!

This sets up for a version of the Mk model that scales linearly in observations instead of exponentially in features, and can handle interactions, reversibility, coupling, missing data, and more. We think this could be quite a generally useful advance! 4/

Excited to share a new preprint! Lots of evolutionary processes, from AMR to cancer, involve biology acquiring features (drug resistances, mutations, etc). These are sometimes called "accumulation pathways", an instance of discrete character evolution. 1/

It's 17th May and Norway is beautiful. Gratulerer med dagen! 🇳🇴 (lots going on in arXiv and other science news, but that's for later)

David Attenborough, 'the voice for nature,' turns 100 reut.rs/48EFrlX reut.rs/48EFrlX

The dish occupies a cubic metre and the bacteria are generating 10kW of heat. They can clearly access nutrients beyond currently understood biochem (and physics). The wobbly, hot mass has noticeably expanded while I've been typing. An alarm sounds. The sky darkens #bionumbers

Plant mitochondrial fusion factors! pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…