Charles Danko
banner
charlesdanko.bsky.social
Charles Danko
@charlesdanko.bsky.social
I study how genome sequence controls gene expression at Cornell.
June 14, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Absolutely outstanding op ed piece on the importance of US universities standing firm in this moment. Also covers the various tools at their disposal to do so.
arstechnica.com/culture/2025...
Resist, eggheads! Universities are not as weak as they have chosen to be.
Opinion: It’s time for public resistance.
arstechnica.com
April 18, 2025 at 12:58 AM
Reposted by Charles Danko
Our latest work indicates that termination of paused RNA polymerase is its most likely fate, while attempting to reconcile disparate estimates of relative rates and pause residency times from previous studies: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Genome-wide dynamic nascent transcript profiles reveal that most paused RNA polymerases terminate
We present a simple model for analyzing and interpreting data from kinetic experiments that measure engaged RNA polymerase occupancy. The framework represents the densities of nascent transcripts with...
www.biorxiv.org
April 8, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
👇🎯 The public isn't going to understand this, unless the presidents of R1 universities around the country <loudly> & <collectively> get out into the public square & start explaining this & calling out the existential threat to the entire 🇺🇸 university system. The silence is deafening right now.
The public really needs to understand this. Every university system in the world rests on public funding, there has never been an alternative model at any time in history.

We have universities for literally the same reason that we have roads and armies.
I don't disagree that the US university business model was/is fragile, but surely not for this reason?

There is no society in the history of humanity that has successfully built a good university system without massive govt subsidies. US had already pushed the idea very far.
March 8, 2025 at 8:45 PM
The admin plans to pick off universities 1-by-1. Instead, we have to come together. Universities need to stand together, fight in court, and take our case to the public by explaining the importance of what we do.
This is a simply shameful statement from Columbia. Rolling over in the face of bad faith, unconstitutional attacks by a bully only encourages the bully. When the Trump admin comes for other universities, and they will, I sincerely hope they do the opposite of Columbia.
The government is setting a precedent to illegally withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of approved funding from any university for any reason, starting with Columbia, and Columbia's response is to call it "legitimate"???
president.columbia.edu/news/respond...
March 8, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Yikes. That Trump economy is really starting to shine.
March 1, 2025 at 1:12 AM
Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦
February 28, 2025 at 10:54 PM
My hot take: Universities and medical centers need to get *MUCH* better at outreach and explaining the benefits of funding independent research to the public.
February 10, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
I wanted to write briefly about a very pleasant experience we recently had coordinating and collaborating closely on competing publications with 2 other teams. 1/
January 24, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
We wrote an opinion article inspired by the recent exciting reports on the sequence determinants of TSS selection + old observations on TFs activation domains. More posts on this soon!

Q-rich activation domains: flexible ‘rulers’ for transcription start site selection?
www.cell.com/trends/genet...
Q-rich activation domains: flexible ‘rulers’ for transcription start site selection?
Recent findings broadened the function of RNA polymerase II (Pol II) proximal promoter motifs from quantitative regulators of transcription to important determinants of transcription start site (TSS) position. These motifs are recognized by transcription factors (TFs) that we propose to term ‘ruler’ TFs (rTFs), such as NRF1, NF-Y, YY1, ZNF143, BANP, and members of the SP, ETS, and CRE families, sharing as a common feature a glutamine-rich (Q-rich) effector domain also enriched in valine, isoleucine, and threonine (QVIT-rich). We propose that rTFs guide TSS location by constraining the position of the pre-initiation complex (PIC) during its promoter recognition phase through a specialized, and still enigmatic, class of activation domains.
www.cell.com
December 9, 2024 at 11:03 AM
Reposted by Charles Danko
Brief thread on our opinion article "Q-rich activation domains: flexible ‘rulers’ for transcription start site selection?". Transcription people are surely aware of the important reports on the DNA sequence determinants of start site (TSS) selection in the human genome that came out this year. 1/15
December 22, 2024 at 3:21 PM
Latest from our lab: Training sequence-to-function models using matched genome sequence and functional data improves performance in variant interpretation tasks.

Congrats to Adam He and Nathan Palamuttam on getting this out.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Training deep learning models on personalized genomic sequences improves variant effect prediction
Sequence-to-function models have broad applications in interpreting the molecular impact of genetic variation, yet have been criticized for poor performance in this task. Here we show that training mo...
www.biorxiv.org
October 18, 2024 at 5:38 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
RNA polymerases reshape chromatin and coordinate transcription on individual fibers

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
January 4, 2024 at 8:43 AM
I just sent my congressman a strong letter supporting Ukraine aid. Please consider doing the same!
December 7, 2023 at 9:21 PM
Important thread.
Time to roll out an updated version of something I post periodically, why the @NIH needs to change its modular budget and budget cap.

The Modular Budget was introduced in 1998 by the@NIH. If you stayed under the ceiling of $250,000, you didn't have to break down your costs.
November 10, 2023 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
Let's say is clearly: $474K is what the modular budget cap would be if it kept pace with inflation over 25 years. 
 
If you're sticking to $250K these days, how much is that equivalent to in 1998 dollars?

About $132,000.
November 10, 2023 at 12:36 PM
Antisemitic threats are disgusting. I am heartbroken to hear about this happening in our community.
www.cnn.com/2023/10/29/u...
October 30, 2023 at 5:58 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
New preprint by Sonny Arora and Jianyu Yang in our lab, in collab with Frank Pugh & lab, Minoru Ko, and Tomohiko Akiyama.

We started with a simple question: are all Fox TFs pioneer factors? We investigated with the help of ChIP-exo and neural networks. 1/n

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org
October 28, 2023 at 11:37 PM
This looks very interesting. 🧬🔄🧬
October 28, 2023 at 10:43 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
Interesting new preprint from Corri Sept & Martin Aryee et al. combines MNase HiChIP for CTCF with new FactorFinder algorithm to profile 3D interactions conditional on CTCF being bound.

Nice insights in loop extrusion from the perspective of CTCF-anchored cohesin
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
October 24, 2023 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
Fellow Ithaca:

Our congressman Marc Molinaro is considering voting for Speaker Jordan. Consider sending a letter stating how you feel about this.

Contact here: molinaro.house.gov/contact/

Afair, Our district is no longer safe red. Molinaro will have to win a wider swath of us to keep his seat.
October 17, 2023 at 11:45 PM
Reposted by Charles Danko
Happy to share our latest preprint -- we built an integrated compendium of all publicly available human gut microbiome 16S data (~168,000 samples) and used it to explore patterns of microbiome variation around the world

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
October 17, 2023 at 6:20 PM