29 Sep, 2018

I designed a patch for a worm space mission!  The Molecular Muscle Experiment will be sending worms into space to study the negative effects of spaceflight on the body, and to help discover therapies to enable long-distance space exploration and treatments for muscle loss. The worms will be flown to the International Space Station, grown for several generations, then analyzed in the lab. The launch is scheduled for a SpaceX mission in November 2018! You can read more about the experiment here.

26 Aug, 2018

It's a wonderful honor to present my new drawing for this year's ASCB|EMBO meeting! The intricate patterns of our night sky have inspired many ancient cultures who connected the stars to create constellations portraying myths and legends. This 'modern' star map is a scientific take on zodiac signs - showing constellations that form some of the most widely used model organisms and cell types. These model systems have greatly facilitated research and allowed us to discover much of what is known

30 Jul, 2018

Brain tumors are aggressive and deadly cancers, yet it has been difficult to study them in the laboratory. A new Nature Methods paper reports a ground-breaking method to grow tumors inside brain organoids, which are tiny organ-like structures derived from human stem cells that resemble the architecture of the brain. These tumors develop after introducing clinically-relevant mutations using genome-editing, and mimic the onset of brain cancer within the human brain - allowing researchers to learn

23 Jul, 2018

A gibbon is swinging across a river within an epigenetic landscape, which regulates compaction and expression of our DNA. The arid desert illustrates loosely packed DNA containing actively expressed genes, whereas the tropical forest represents densely packed chromatin. The gibbon genome is similar to ours, but many regions were heavily rearranged during evolution. Still, even the rearranged genes keep their original epigenetic landscapes because the shuffling has occurred at boundaries between