richard white

In defense of basic science - my new video about how we balance basic vs. translational science: youtu.be/yl6ETxRfQn8?si…. . And why we should encourage a culture of wandering to solve problems:. A team effort between @UniofOxford and @OxfordSparks.

For #zebrafish people - registration and abstract submission for ZDM19 in Oxford is now live - check it out here: zdmsociety.org/zdm19. A great lineup of speakers in a beautiful setting.

We are recruiting! If you are passionate about technology development, protein engineering, computational design, directed evolution, chemical biology - please reach out! (The setting is pretty nice too…)

We're seeking to fill two roles: a postdoc and a research assistant. Both will focus on resistance mechanisms in brain tumour models using various approaches (in vivo, spatial omics, CRISPR). Please apply if this aligns with your previous experience! shorturl.at/hZ6mG

@dvir_a @TechnionLive congrats Dvir!

Happy to share that I’ve been promoted to Associate Professor at the @TechnionLive. Grateful to my students, colleagues, and collaborators who made this possible.

Want to understand how antibodies protect us from disease? Join our team at Arc! We are looking for a PhD-level Scientist, who will develop new approaches for profiling human antibody repertoires and discovering new antibodies. Apply here: bit.ly/HornsLabAbDisc…

Honored to be selected as this year’s March of Dimes Prize awardee. Grateful for the incredible work my lab has done over the years. I embraced developmental biology when I started my lab and am excited to see its principles translate to patients. marchofdimes.org/about/news/ren….

CUT homeobox factors modulate chromatin accessibility in neurons biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

@JSheltzer @ScienceMagazine This is crazy. Thanks for sharing this. Despite it all, twitter/x (whatever) is still a good way to disseminate science.

AI is cool and all... but a new paper in @ScienceMagazine kind of figured out the origin of life? The paper reports the discovery of a simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.

Whoa. An RNA molecule that can replicate itself? This seems ever closer to the origins of life on earth. Really amazing paper in @ScienceMagazine: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Too much data, too little thinking. A important essay from Ruslan Medzhitov on the importance of understanding data, not just generating it. A must read. @RMedzhitov @YaleIBIO nature.com/articles/s4157…

@RosenbergLabBCM @TAMESTX Congratulations Susan - always nice to see deserving awards like this.

Expressing immense gratitude to Lyda Hill Philanthropies and @TAMESTX for the 2026 Lyda Hill Prize in Biological Sciences. From San Antonio TAMEST meeting 2026. Thank you!

🧬 Another super exciting new work from the lab: Decoding the gene regulatory landscape through multimodal learning of protein–DNA interactions. 👉 Link to preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… In this work, we introduce Chromnitron, a biologically grounded multimodal foundation model that decodes the global gene regulatory landscape by hundreds to thousands of proteins binding in the genome. ⁉️ Why is this protein-centered view of regulatory genomics so important? DNA sequence 🧬provides the same genetic blueprint, but the regulatory logic that gives rise to diverse cell types and states – in both health and disease conditions – is executed by the 100s-1000s of chromatin proteins that differentially read the DNA sequences to establish cell-type-specific gene expression programs. 🤖 Chromnitron is specifically developed to decode this cell-type-specific regulatory logic. Designed to learn from the first principles that determines protein–DNA interactions in the cell, Chromnitron integrates 1) genomic DNA sequence, 2) cell-type-specific chromatin states, and importantly, 3) protein sequence-encoded structural features. 👨🏻‍💻 Through large-scale pre-training & fine-tuning with a finely curated atlas of high-quality datasets, Chromnitron learns the shared and protein-specific mechanisms of protein–DNA interactions, and thus can accurately predict the binding landscapes across hundreds of proteins in unseen cell types. 💡Chromnitron isn’t just accurate and cell-type-specific prediction — it is a discovery engine! With Chromnitron: we identified novel regulators of T cell exhaustion (ZNF865 & ZNF766); we reconstructed the dynamic regulatory landscapes of how global chromatin proteins orchestrate neurodevelopment. 🔮 Chromnitron represents a significant step toward predictive, interpretable, and mechanistic understanding of gene regulation and cell fate determination. We expect Chromnitron to accelerate discovery and engineering in regulatory genomics, particularly in human biology, and empower therapeutic opportunities. 🙏🏻 Last, this is another wonderful collaboration with Dr. Aristotelis Tsirigos @artsinyc, and led by the brilliant Drs. Jimin Tan @tan_jimin, Xi Fu @alexanderfuxi, and Xinyu Ling @Dennislxy, and many more co-authors and friends who helped make this work truly possible! 👉 Find out more about the model and discoveries (e.g. architecture, interpretability, benchmarking, generalizability, etc): biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #MultimodalAI #GeneRegulation #TranscriptionFactor #RegulatoryGenomics #CellFate #AIinBiology

Cancer cells with high plasticity underlie progression and drug resistance - new work from @TuomasTammela shows how this works in lung cancer and extends to other tumors. Congrats on a beautiful study I've seen evolve over many years and will open up new fields: nature.com/articles/s4158…

This is a very cool story that touches upon many mysteries in cancer - why do some people transition from pre-neoplastic to neoplastic states? What role does germline genetics play in that risk? How does RNA orchestrate this process? Suspect this is the tip of an iceberg where somatic and germline genetics intersect.

@KharasLab @GauravA_UK @bloodgenes @_ruslansoldatov @AbdelWahablab @AlexBickMDPhD Congrats!

Check out our latest story science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…! Huge thanks to @GauravA_UK and the @bloodgenes lab for driving this work forward together with us. This was a great team effort with outstanding collaborators @_ruslansoldatov, @AbdelWahablab, and @AlexBickMDPhD.

@Eric_Betzig Entirely agree - even a single meeting in the middle of this breaks the whole process. But one additional thought: it's also useful to know when to break the isolation, and then talk to others. Which is also hard to figure out.

Absolutely. Every major idea I’ve had, and nearly every solution to a roadblock when executing those ideas in the lab, has arisen from long periods of solitude. It’s no mystery - the process of discovery involves winnowing through an infinite thicket of possibilities to find the answer, and any interruption to this reverie crashes the whole edifice of thought to the ground.

A pioneering #melanoma researcher - Georgina Long @ProfGLongMIA - has been named one of @Nature's 2026 Ones to watch - for her work on novel cancer immunotherapies. Check it out: nature.com/immersive/d415…

I’m excited to share a new postdoctoral opportunity in my lab at Stanford to study the consequences of gene dosage alterations in iPS cells. Check out the posting below and shoot me an email if you’re interested -

Going to be a great meeting

Cancer doesn’t develop in isolation—and neither should our science. This London conference invites us to rethink cancer through the lens of host–tumour interactions, unlocking new therapeutic possibilities by considering the whole individual. linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…