Laura White
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laurakwhite.bsky.social
Laura White
@laurakwhite.bsky.social
Colorado RNA biologist & tRNA enthusiast exploring the wild frontiers of nanopore direct RNA sequencing at the intrepid venn diagram of northern blots & machine learning.
Reposted by Laura White
Now this is a movie plot!!! Someone understands grad school.
February 14, 2026 at 11:10 PM
Reposted by Laura White
Ever notice that when one gene is disrupted, its orthologs get upregulated? This phenomenon, known as transcriptional adaptation, has been controversial and mysterious - glad to see that we are starting to learn how it works.
Mechanisms linking cytoplasmic decay of translation-defective mRNA to transcriptional adaptation
Transcriptional adaptation (TA) is a genetic robustness mechanism through which mutant messenger RNA (mRNA) decay induces sequence-dependent up-regulation of so-called adapting genes. How cytoplasmica...
www.science.org
February 13, 2026 at 9:42 PM
Reposted by Laura White
I have been using Claude Code recently, and I’m now convinced that LLM coding agents can solve one of the biggest problems in neuroscience: technical debt.

Labs generate tons of low-quality code bc the incentive structure rewards short-term productivity over longer-term concerns like 1/
February 11, 2026 at 2:11 PM
Reposted by Laura White
How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller?

Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase.
1/n
A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand
The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...
www.science.org
February 13, 2026 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Laura White
Happy birthday to Charles Darwin,
patron saint of tired scientists, grumpy fieldworkers, and hating your own manuscript.
February 12, 2026 at 6:58 PM
Reposted by Laura White
I remade an old render with a more exact version. The most efficient packing possible of 17 squares into a larger square. I use it as an inspiring example: just because something looks stupid doesn't mean it's not the best that you can do.
February 6, 2026 at 4:28 AM
Reposted by Laura White
1/4
Rep. Kelly Morrison, is a practicing M.D. Her description of conditions in the Whipple detention facility are horrifying.
Here is a rough transcript of the video she just posted. @kellymorrisonmn.bsky.social
February 1, 2026 at 11:22 PM
The best thing I did for two different precocious 9/10 year olds in my life last year was sign them up for The Week, Jr., a kids news magazine that is just banging out unbiased reporting in between cool facts about the winter olympics and the world's longest living lemur as we live through history.
February 2, 2026 at 2:20 AM
Reposted by Laura White
[looking through a microscope, crying] i am begging you to do something sensible one time

[the infinite variety of forms most beautiful] lol no
January 31, 2026 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Laura White
📢 Rfam 15.1 is here!

✨ 50 new RNA families including riboswitch candidates, plastid ncRNAs, snoRNAs, plant xrRNAs and more.
🧬 10 families updated with 3D structures
🖥️ Brand new interactive alignment viewer

Take a look xfam.wordpress.com/2026/01/08/r...

#RNA #Bioinformatics #RNAbiology
January 28, 2026 at 11:16 AM
Reposted by Laura White
Having fun with the microscope lately. Here’s one of my favourite artsy and slightly psychedelic shots of #Marchantia chloroplasts and a fluorescent membrane reporter. (z-stack maximum projection)
January 27, 2026 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by Laura White
January 28, 2026 at 1:51 AM
Reposted by Laura White
Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now
January 24, 2026 at 7:39 PM
Reposted by Laura White
Me: "It would take an extremely fascinating new bird fact to distract me from the horrors"

New paper: hold my beer

Birds are very eye-dependent and eyes usually require a bunch of energy (and oxygen to metabolize it). Bird retinas run oxygen-free though, perhaps to fly extremely high (low O2)!
January 22, 2026 at 8:05 PM
Reposted by Laura White
Another yellow Lego life raft has surfaced after nearly 29 years at the bottom of the sea. Back in 1997, 28,700 of these plummeted into the ocean when a shipping container with nearly five million pieces of Lego inside fell off the cargo ship Tokio Express, some 20 miles off Land's End.
January 21, 2026 at 7:56 PM
This is both horrific and the one good use case for “sorry I don’t see race” in conversation.
"“They specifically asked me if I knew where the Hmong families lived on my street & in the neighborhood.” Lugert-Thom responded, “I don’t know anything about that” & she said they then asked, “Well, what about the Asian families?”"

"“I was a bit shaken & a bit shocked of what I was asked to do.”"
A St. Paul resident says federal officers knocked on her door and asked her to identify Hmong and Asian households in her North End neighborhood last week.
January 14, 2026 at 2:46 PM
A quick note to fellow winter blues people: this year my new primary care doc encouraged me to get ferritin to >50 ng/ml even though my levels were “normal range.” Took months but the energy difference is huge. Winter solstice +/- 3 weeks has always been hibernation time for me & now it’s… fine? ❄️🤷
January 14, 2026 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Laura White
This is Minneapolis elementary school pick up:

The alert also recommends: "Bring your whistle & wear your hat. If you have a respirator or goggles bring them in a small backpack. We don't want to show up looking alarming for the kids but chemical weapons are being used widely in the area."

2/2
January 14, 2026 at 12:45 AM
Reposted by Laura White
Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version?

I made an app you might like: adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/

It all started a few years ago... 🧵
January 13, 2026 at 9:12 PM
Reposted by Laura White
Happy to share this work with Virginia Sanchez-Puerta (not on bsky) and colleagues on how loss of photosynthesis in these (strange!) plants affects translation and tRNAs in plastids and mitochondria....

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/n
January 13, 2026 at 4:45 AM
Reposted by Laura White
Our job is to keep showing up and taking care of each other.

And knowing when to pause to refill so we can go back to doing it more.

Everything else is commentary.
January 9, 2026 at 10:39 PM
Reposted by Laura White
I always like the stuff humans knocked out of the park on a first try like yep that’s a cup no need to go further
Something lovely for the weekend!

Minoan cups made by Bronze Age potters some 3,800 years ago!

Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete 📷 by me

#Archaeology
January 11, 2026 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Laura White
Save the date | Jan. 14 | Free webinar

Meeting with Congressional members or their staff is one of the most effective ways to advocate for science. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to plan and conduct a successful congressional meeting from start to finish.
Inside the meeting: Best practices for engaging policymakers
Jan. 14, 2026
www.asbmb.org
January 3, 2026 at 11:11 PM
Reposted by Laura White
When I explain to people what is involved with writing a successful grant, they simply don’t believe me.

I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!
I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1
January 3, 2026 at 1:14 AM
Reposted by Laura White
This is maybe my favorite photo from Colorado history. From Granby, probably around 1905. I would get a tattoo of this.
November 15, 2023 at 6:14 AM