Oded Rechavi
@OdedRechavi • 145,783 subscribers
Transgenerational inheritance, q.e.d: @qedscience https://t.co/tKNk6qiSlZ TED: https://t.co/rcOm9TSTf5 Huberman Lab Podcast: https://t.co/xZTNlx9nbi
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A new mechanism for “RNA memory”! 😱 Thrilled to share another crazy paper from the lab (can’t believe we posted 2 in 2 days!), summarizing >10 years of research: Work on transgenerational inheritance of small RNAs in the powerful model organism C. elegans changed how we think about what’s possible in inheritance and evolution, because it allows the most heretical thing: inheritance of parental responses to the environment! However, it’s still unclear whether RNAs are inherited across generations in other animals, largely because the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases that amplify heritable small RNAs and prevent their dilution in C. elegans are not conserved in mammals. In this new work, an amazing collaboration with the Rink and Wurtzel labs, we show that planarians establish long-lasting and heritable small RNA–based gene regulatory states despite lacking canonical RNA-dependent RNA polymerases and nuclear RNAi machinery (that are required in C. elegans). You might say “they are both worms…” BUT planarians are evolutionarily very distant from C. elegans (flatworms vs. roundworms, diverged more than 500 million years ago), making this particularly surprising. These are totally different animals. We find that ingestion of double-stranded RNA induces sequence-specific silencing that persists for months and survives repeated cycles of whole-body regeneration. Even more strikingly, RNAi can be transferred between animals, echoing James V. McConnell’s controversial “RNA memory” experiments from the 1970s (his lab was targeted by the Unabomber terrorist Ted Kaczynski, who sent McConnell a bomb. This and other controversies ended this line of experiments…) Mechanistically, we find that the response transitions from a transient systemic dsRNA-triggered phase to a stable, cell-autonomous post-transcriptional “memory phase” maintained by antisense small RNAs. Using a new luminescence reporter (transgenesis is currently impossible in planarians), we show that silencing spreads along the targeted gene and identify a weird type of planarian small RNAs with untemplated polyA tails. RNAi inheritance without canonical RdRPs establishes planarians as a powerful system for studying RNA-based regulatory inheritance beyond C. elegans and raises the possibility that RNA-mediated inheritance may be more broadly conserved in animals, potentially even in mammals. Here’s a video of a planarian that is treated by RNAi against β-catenin and develops multiple heads instead of just one. This is one of the phenotypes that is inherited. Another phenotype is “loss of eyes” (which we show is not only inherited across multiple regeneration cycles, but can also be transmitted between animals in transplantation experiments). Amazing work led by first authors Prakash Cherian and Idit Aviram (co-supervised by Omri and me). Please read the preprint, the link is in the next tweet, and share!
Oded Rechavi191,518 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Important announcement!!!🫵💥💫 Would you have a tooth pulled if it helped your chances to get an important grant funded? Absurd question (obviously), but the situation right now is so bad funding-wise, that I bet some of you actually considered it for a second… Well, don’t get desperate - we created a new tool that might help! (keep your teeth!) I’m excited to announce that as of today we are officially releasing “QED for Grants” for everyone. What started off as an extension of our existing paper review platform, grew in the last few months to an entirely new design. We’ve been working like crazy on this, and although we have more things we want to add in the (very near) future, we decided to release our AI for grants NOW, earlier than planned. It’s not perfect, no AI is, but for the first time, when I run my own grants through QED Science, I feel it gets the research, finds real problems, and gives me very useful feedback that I can implement before submission. It’s like sending it to 20 scientists from my domain, knowing they’ll agree to dedicate their entire week to carefully read and comment on every line. It’s very important to write your own grants yourself, it makes you think hard and you learn a lot from doing it, and q.e.d’s system is designed to preserve these positive aspects and augment them - you get feedback on your own writing, we don’t write for you!! But at the same time, a typical PI spends many months every year writing proposals and sadly only a tiny fraction gets funded, even if the ideas are good. When you are forced to submit an unreasonable amount of grants the quality of the writing drops, and rejection rates increase. Not because the essence is bad. It’s simply too competitive right now (the cuts made it so much worse) and if your proposal is not super clear and tight, and if it’s not a perfect fit for the grant you’re submitting, you’re doomed. Our grant solution is not an authoring, text-generating tool. It gives you constructive feedback on your writing (it comments on the deep things, not grammar and typos). It’s meant to help you with the questions that torment you late at night (“is this a good fit?”, “Is this novel enough?”, “Did I miss something?”). Tens of thousands of you already use q.e.d to improve your manuscripts and critically read papers, we built the grant tool by the same principles (you’ll identify many of the features that you told us you like). We’ve processed thousands of proposals, learned where things fail, where reviewers get stuck, why good ideas come out weak. We interviewed hundreds of scientists, and also experts who work in funding agencies and university research authorities, and implemented their feedback (we’re constantly looking for more feedback). Our AI is always happy to give you constructive (and polite!) critique, and it will go through your grant line-by-line, forcing you to improve clarity, flag weak points, and push the whole thing to a higher standard. We study, in scale, what gets funded and what doesn’t, and what is the perfect fit for each type of grant. So please, use it, pressure-test it, tell us where it fails, and together we’ll improve it every day to put you in the best position for actually testing your ideas in the real world. As always with q.e.d, the system is completely secured and private, and we are NOT training on your data (see the FAQ on our website). Please like, retweet, and share with your favorite colleagues! (link to the platform below in the thread👇)
Oded Rechavi48,866 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
The real story being every project that ends up being published
Oded Rechavi428,143 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
When it's your time to present in lab meeting and you don't have new results to show
Oded Rechavi34,121 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
The bureaucratic work academics need to do before they are free to actually do science for 5 minutes
Oded Rechavi171,479 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
ביום חמישי הקרוב זה קורה! אני ממליץ על ספר בעונה החדשה של תוכנית המלצת הספרים הכי פופולרית בטלוויזיה ״אתה חייב לקרוא את זה!״ אני מזהיר שהמלצתי על ספר ממש מוזר והתחרות קשה, אבל גם האדם עבורו היינו צריכים למצוא המלצה הוא חתיכת טיפוס. רוצים לדעת אם ניצחתי או הובסתי קשות? צפו ביום חמישי ב22:20 ב״כאן 11״! Nir Zahavi Shesh Bakof כאן
Oded Rechavi22,112 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
When you continue doing your PhD although you're not sure you're on the right track
Oded Rechavi125,858 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
Presentations of scientists that take ERC Interview training courses
Oded Rechavi173,460 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren
Continuing to work to meet the deadline while the world burns
Oded Rechavi49,694 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Seeing the world as an academic that only stays for the length of the conference
Oded Rechavi42,192 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
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If you watch just one video, please watch this (to the sound of Biden's speech - turn up the volume).
Oded Rechavi63,351 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren