Raya Shu | RNA nerd

POV @SpaceX catching a rocket

In the latest issue! Exploring RNA-guided DNA scissors in eukaryotes: Are Fanzors counterparts of CRISPR-Cas12s? dlvr.it/TDg047

My postdoctoral work is finally out! Please consider retweeting. I am very proud of this project. I want to thank my wonderful advisors @mbarnalab and @jkpritch and collaborators Theo Susanto, @xsui98, @WangXiaoLab, @spence_jeffrey_, and many others for a major team effort!

An mRNA #adjuvant that encodes #IL12 amplifies and prolongs immunity from the Pfizer #COVID19 vaccine in aged mice, and features a multiorgan protection sequence that restricts expression to targeted tissues. @ScienceTM scim.ag/7TU

It took more than a DECADE... but finally it’s published!!! It started as a CRAZY idea but after tons of hard work we built it: We hijacked the endogenous secretion systems of Toxoplasma gondii, a brain parasite, to deliver active proteins to neurons 👇 nature.com/articles/s4156…

Delighted to share our new pre-print on translational activity of 80S monosomes. @AlbertBlandy @EltonVasconcel8 @AmyTurn67763683 @LabFontana @MichaelaAgapiou Thanks to @BBSRC and @wellcometrust. Great for this work to benefit from @RiboCode team input biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

R can not handle big data? R Dplyr vs. DuckDB - How to Enhance Your Data Processing Pipelines with R DuckDB appsilon.com/post/r-dplyr-v… #rstats

Thrilled to announce AlphaFold 3 which can predict the structures and interactions of nearly all of life’s molecules with state-of-the-art accuracy including proteins, DNA and RNA. Biology is a complex dynamical system so modeling interactions is crucial blog.google/technology/ai/…

Our most complex biologic system—immunity—is reviewed in 3 new @CellCellPress papers, open-access Adaptive cell.com/cell/fulltext/… Innate cell.com/cell/fulltext/… New insights cell.com/cell/fulltext/… @RMedzhitov

Two research teams successfully regenerate brain neural pathways #inmice using stem cells from rats. 🐀 🧵 @cellcellpress @leo_jwu @kkbaldwin238

How to pick a problem. Today in @CellCellPress. 1/53 cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

The April 2024 issue of Cell Press Trends in Pharmacological Sciences is online now. cell.com/trends/pharmac… On the cover: Translational adaptation in breast cancer metastasis @a_navickas @Institut_Curie @schen_sc @genophoria @Ucsf_Biochem @UCSF

Online Now: Time-resolved profiling of RNA binding proteins throughout the mRNA life cycle dlvr.it/T5GfWv

Towards self-regeneration: exploring the limits of protein synthesis in the PURE cell-free transcription -translation system biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Is forgetting a bug or a feature? Can you delay it and remember longer? Our 🥶COOLEST paper to date (and our most poetic abstract…) Show LOVE ❤️and please SHARE! Thread (1/N)👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Cracking the regulatory code: We have genomes for 1000s of species, but ENCODE only for 2 – what do we do? Natural language models have shown that syntax and semantics can be learned from text alone. Can we do the same for genomes?⬇️ biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Excited and proud to share our #SingleCell dissection of #ALS and #FTLD out in #Cell this week, across 620,000 cells, 44 cell types, 73 donors, and two brain regions. Although ALS affects #movement vs. FTLD #cognition, the two are nearly identical in the cell types, genes, and pathways they affect, both in #familial (monogenic) and in #sporadic (polygenic) cases, providing hope and candidate targets for common #therapeutic programs, implicating #LongRange-projecting neurons, and #cilia genes and pathways, necessary for their growth, but also #vascular changes and blood-brain-barrier function and integrity. News: news.mit.edu/2024/als-ftld-… Paper: cell.com/cell/abstract/… Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2021.0… Data: synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn5… #NeuroDegeneration #ADRD #Alzheimers #FTD #FrontoTemporalDementia #LouGehrigsDisease #MyriamHeiman #SebastianPineda #VeroniqueBelzil #LiveLikeLou @iamalsorg @bsw5020 @alsadvocacy @ProjectALSorg #MotorCortex #BetzCells #VENs #C9orf72 #TDP43 #NeuroDegen #MCx @MTPA_US @NIH @NIHAging @GerstnerFdn @PackardFdn

An exciting new report in @NatureBiotech from @WangXiaoLab’s team led by @HongyuChenChem shows that mRNAs with branched poly-A tails yield much higher levels, and prolonged production, of the corresponding proteins compared with conventional single-tailed mRNA. This discovery could enhance macromolecular therapeutics and stimulate additional tail-engineering approaches to modulate the potency and durability of proteins made from mRNA.

ML models like Evo + AlphaFold are emerging to engineer molecules. It is sometimes unclear how to use these tools to build drugs. We trace a realistic design, build and test loop of virus capsids on LatchBio.

Is DNA all you need? In new work, we report Evo, a genomic foundation model that learns across the fundamental languages of biology: DNA, RNA, and proteins. Evo is capable of both prediction tasks and generative design, from molecular to whole genome scale.