Miscellaneous Updates and Links, June 2023

• Regarding “Money Money Money”, my university finally processed my funding, and now I can spend it!

• In related news, research on the meiosis project is moving forward. I have successfully identified factors that can activate REC8 expression in human iPSCs. I am now working on characterizing these REC8-positive cells, and testing ways to achieve expression of a broader range of meiosis-related genes.

REC8-mGreenLantern reporter expression, seen by fluorescence microscopy and overlaid with a phase-contrast image.

• Regarding herpesviruses, a new preprint has claimed that VZV vaccination reduces Alzheimer’s risk. Additionally, there have been some interesting studies recently about how EBV causes cancer, and how it causes multiple sclerosis

• Two cool papers were published this spring about using transcription factors to reprogram cells to different cell types (1, 2).

• Regarding epigenetic inheritance, I’ve been meaning to blog about a study which induced DNA methylation at particular sites in mouse embryonic stem cells, generated mice from those cells, and showed that the methylation patterns were heritable. The mechanism is still a bit mysterious: “The heritable CGI methylation was subjected to reprogramming in parental PGCs and subsequently reestablished in the next generation at post-implantation stages”. Hopefully I will actually have time to write the post soon.

• I was recently a peer reviewer for the first time! I can’t say which paper I reviewed, but it was certainly interesting being on the other side of the process.

• I just submitted my annual progress report for my F31 fellowship. There was an annoying bug where I had to link my NCBI account to import my list of publications, but NCBI changed its login methods¹ so I couldn’t link it properly. I ended up having to just make a new NCBI account and start over. This was super annoying and wasted about 4 hours of my time.

1. Apparently NCBI didn’t trust themselves to have a secure login system, so they now make everyone log in through a third party authenticator like Google, ORCID, or Login.gov