Benjamin Weekley, PhD

Interested in histone H3 serotonylation? Then check out our brand new preprint out today! This work was spearheaded by Instructor extraordinaire, Dr. Min Chen of the Maze Lab, and represents another great collaboration with the labs of Drs. Haitao Li, @MuirLab, David Li, Samuele

PRESS RELEASE| @icahnmountsinai continues to rank among top institutions for @NIHFunding sustaining its overall standing as No. 11 nationally🎉A HUGE CONGRATS to our faculty, staff & trainees who continue to elevate @mountsinainyc’s research enterprise👉 mountsinai.org/about/newsroom…

A new Nature paper from Johns Hopkins (by Prof. Lin @DingchangLin ) just solved one of the hardest problems in biology: how do you record what every cell in a tissue experienced over time, not just what it looks like right now? The answer: GEMINI — Granularly Expanding Memory for Intracellular Narrative Integration. It works exactly like tree rings. Cells are genetically engineered to express a computationally designed protein assembly. As the assembly grows inside the cell, it captures cellular activity as fluorescent ring patterns — each ring a timestamp, each ring's properties encoding signal intensity. Look at a cross-section under a microscope and you can read the cell's history backward, with ~15-minute resolution. The key: cells build the recorder themselves. GEMINI doesn't interfere with normal function — it just quietly writes. What they demonstrated: In a full tumor xenograft, GEMINI captured every cancer cell's activity history across the entire tumor while it continued to grow normally. For the first time, researchers can look back and see how different regions of the same tumor responded differently to therapy over time — not snapshots, but film. In a mouse brain, GEMINI recorded neural activity dynamics without disrupting behavior, coordination, or memory. It could temporally resolve the history of a brain seizure. Why this matters: Every tool we have in biology gives you state — what the cell looks like now. Sequencing, imaging, proteomics — all snapshots. GEMINI gives you trajectory. It's the difference between a photograph and a video, applied to every cell in an organ simultaneously. The team is explicit that AI-based decoding tools will be central to reading GEMINI's output at whole-brain scale. This is the data layer that makes temporal single-cell atlases possible. Paper: nature.com/articles/s4158… Congratulations @DingchangLin

🚨 Today in @Nature, we report GEMINI—a genetically encoded intracellular memory device that writes cellular dynamics into tree-ring-like fluorescent patterns within cytoplasmic protein assemblies.[1/n] nature.com/articles/s4158…

Below is the story of the first patient treated with a prime-edited therapeutic, developed by @PrimeMedicine in a trial led by Dr. Élie Haddad and his team at CHU Sainte-Justine. This teenager suffered from chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), an immunodeficiency, and now—10 months after treatment—the patient is healthy, stable, and living with a functioning immune system. Tracy Attebury, whose story was previously told by @ginakolata @nytimes, was the second patient treated with a prime-edited therapeutic. cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/54638.html

How does #Dopamine shape the synaptic landscape during reinforcement? FIND OUT on Friday, Feb 27, 3pm, when you DIG OUT ❄️❄️❄️ & JOIN hosts Drs. Marco Rizzo, @AliceGiani_, & Rimjhim Tomar as they welcome @columbia's Dr. Eddy @albarran_neuro to #MSNseminars. In-Person: Hess 5-101

1/3 New bioRxiv preprint from the lab: “Minute-scale coupling of chromatin marks and transcriptional bursts”. Led by Xiohui Gao & Chaebeen Ko. bioRxiv : biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…

Our paper on the transcription-coupled H3K36me3 deposition is finally out! We found that histone methyltransferase Set2 deposits　H3K36me3 specifically on the reassembled nucleosome in coordination with FACT.  Great collaboration with Sekine Lab!  science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Curious how astrocytes in the PFC regulate the negative effects of stress? Read our preprint on Biorxiv now: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… So excited to start my astrocyte journey with @holtlm90 & @EricJNestler!! 🧠 PS: hear all about it at Winter Brain this Sunday (5-7pm).

Thru an unbiased, forward genetic screen in Drosophila, @VollumInstitute's @DongeunHeo found an unexpected, non-neuronal role for dSarm/SARM1 pathway in #Astrocyte morphogenesis. INTERESTED? JOIN Swagata Dey, @batuhanayci & @ChloeLopezLee when they host Dr. Heo at #MSNseminars.

Thrilled to share our newest method for transcriptome recording using TimeVault! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Wow! So cool🤯 Satellite glial cells can deliver mitochondria to neurons through channels called tunneling nanotubes. Congratulations to Ru-Rong Ji's lab @DukeU! nature.com/articles/s4158…

A New Year, a new paper out on Jan 1 in @ScienceMagazine ! Congratulations to @SiddhantUJain and all our co-authors and collaborators! This study answers a longstanding question in our field regarding recruitment of chromatin regulatory machinery and provides a powerful new framework for development of precision medicines in #cancer and beyond! @kadochlab @alex2110x @hhmi_science @DanaFarberNews @DanaFarber science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… #generegulation #chromatin #cancer #therapeutics #basicscience #BAFcomplex #mSWISNF #chromatinremodeling

Heartfelt congratulations to @ian_maze2 for becoming the Mount Sinai Professor of Neuroepigenomics and to all past and current members of the Maze laboratory for their life-changing research. @SinaiBrain @IcahnMountSinai

If you are interested in the mechanisms of 3D genome folding, long-range regulatory interactions, and their roles in developmental gene regulation and how their misregulation can cause human disease—and want to learn how computational approaches can predict chromatin architecture directly from DNA sequence—this tour-de-force study is well worth reading. Congratulations to Feng Yu @yuefeng_1 and colleagues at Northwestern Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics on an outstanding contribution. @NU_BMG_SQE @NUFeinbergMed @Nature @MolecularCell @CellPressNews @theNASciences @ScienceMagazine nature.com/articles/s4158…

Reimagining biogenic amine signaling in the brain and beyond: Trends in Neurosciences cell.com/trends/neurosc…

New study from the Klose lab! Alan demonstrates how all MLL/SET1 proteins contribute to K4me3 and transcription; they localise to CpG-islands and counteract stochastic premature transcription termination independent of their catalytical activity🥳 biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

FIRST PREPRINT FROM MY POSTDOC: curious about dopamine receptor expressing cells in regions beyond the striatum? Read below about D1 and D2 cells in the ventral hippocampus & how they differentially affect motivated behavior and memory expression! assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-80797…

New preprint from Mari Anguiano @LatinaNeuroNerd & @RunChesterZhang! tinyurl.com/muzs33je Mari used a membrane-TurboID (engineered by Run) to find local proteomes in vivo at distinct mPFC axons & synaptic protein changes during cocaine. Happy to share protocols/reagents!

DON'T MISS this FASCINATING LECTURE! On Friday, December 12th, 3pm, Join #MSNseminars and hosts Drs. Giada Dirupo, Dina Vázquez Carrillo and @freidablostein when @RockefellerUniv's Dr. Lucas Y. Tian presents “Neural basis of symbol compositionality".