@junlab.bsky.social We study quantitative microbial cell physiology.
La Jolla, CA
Joined October 2019
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1/ Out today in Science (@ScienceMagazine): a result a decade in the making, and one that changed how I think about what cells are doing when they grow.
We found a bacterium that grows slower than it could. And we found the molecular switch that lets us reverse it.
Do you use GFP to measure protein abundance? Be very careful. Our new bioRxiv preprint shows that, under translation inhibition, fluorescence can stop tracking how much reporter protein is actually there.
Please share widely.
1/5
A nice historical twist: the classic LacZ strategy from Rick Gourse’s lab still worked quantitatively at the ectopic rrnB promoter. Sometimes a biochemical reporter designed by the pioneers of the field survives a perturbation better than its fluorescent successor.
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We don’t yet know the mechanism. But the lesson is simple: a fluorescent reporter calibrated in one physiological condition cannot automatically be assumed quantitative in another.
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Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
16/ Thank you, Michael Shelley, Yuhai Tu, & Indira Goris at CCB/Flatiron Institute, for hospitality; also to the Simons Foundation for the Pivot Fellowship that made this possible. And Stas Shvartsman, I may yet end up exploring the world of developmental biology after all. ;-)
17/ Above all, thank you William Irvine, Stefano Sacanna, Edo Kussell, and Hiro Funabiki for your friendship. We leave New York with this song, 糸/“Ito”, for all the people we met here.
縦の糸はあなた
横の糸は私
youtu.be/J3RWKacpfAA?si=PATK…