Alex Palazzo
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ribonucleicacids.bsky.social
Alex Palazzo
@ribonucleicacids.bsky.social
Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Studies mRNA processing, mRNA nuclear export, mRNA translation, genomic evolution, junk DNA, junk RNA.
https://www.palazzolab.com/
Pinned
If any current PhD student is interested in a Postdoc position applying computational methods (including machine learning) to study the evolution of nucleotide content in human genes, please contact me.

For some context this is the average nucleotide content of human genes with five exons:
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
Registration is open for "The complex life of #RNA" 2026 @embl.org in Heidelberg!

Excellent invited speakers and 30 short talks and even more flash talks selected from the abstracts!
November 20, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
Finally out in @nature.com! We uncovered a mechanistic framework for a general and conserved mRNA nuclear export pathway. www.nature.com/articles/s41.... 1/
November 19, 2025 at 11:22 PM
The list of invited speakers to the 3rd Codon Usage Meeting (May 31-June 3, 2026 in Montreal Canada) is online!
sites.google.com/view/codonus...
codon usage
About the Conference Codon usage bias—the preference for certain synonymous codons—is a key factor in genome regulation. Codon usage and synonymous codon mutations have been shown to influence gene ex...
sites.google.com
November 18, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
November 15, 2025 at 7:56 PM
I didn't realize that @matthewcobb.bsky.social biography on Crick is out - this should be good. His previous books were excellent.
If read the book, *please* post a review* of it on Amazon, even if you didn't buy it from there. For good or ill (mainly ill), that site continues to be a key factor in perception/visibility of books...

*Pls don't post one-star 'Cover creased' or 'Arrived late' reviews (I have had these...)
November 13, 2025 at 10:58 AM
If any current PhD student is interested in a Postdoc position applying computational methods (including machine learning) to study the evolution of nucleotide content in human genes, please contact me.

For some context this is the average nucleotide content of human genes with five exons:
November 12, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
we're following closely... 👏👏👏
glad to see an "update" to > smallthingsconsidered.blog/schaechter/2...
November 8, 2025 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments

Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
November 7, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Next Codon Usage Meeting, May 31st to June 3rd, 2026 in Montreal right after the RNA Society Meeting. The list of speakers will be up soon.

sites.google.com/view/codonus...
codon usage
About the Conference Codon usage bias—the preference for certain synonymous codons—is a key factor in genome regulation. Codon usage and synonymous codon mutations have been shown to influence gene ex...
sites.google.com
November 5, 2025 at 10:55 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
🧵Remember the preprint claiming SARS-CoV-2 has a "synthetic fingerprint"?

It said a restriction map was "extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.”

I took its claims seriously.

The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis collapses. My new preprint explains why.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833
October 29, 2025 at 7:32 AM
Support Paul Maddox for congress!!! He's running in NC-11. Paul is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at UNC. I've known Paul since grad school days - he's a generous, smart and hard working guy. Having scientists in politics is critical our collective future.
www.maddoxforcongress.com
Paul Maddox for Congress, NC-11
Paul Maddox, professor, entrepreneur, and world-renowned cancer researcher, is running for Congress because working families in Western North Carolina deserve a representative who cares for all our co...
www.maddoxforcongress.com
October 26, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
Thrilled to share our work on transcription initiation and termination being spatially coordinated out today in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
mRNA initiation and termination are spatially coordinated
Transcriptional initiation and termination decisions drive messenger RNA (mRNA) isoform diversity but the relationship between them remains poorly understood. By systematically profiling joint usage o...
www.science.org
October 10, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
"In the two years since the state started charging a 4% surtax on incomes over $1 million, the effort has created a $5.7 billion windfall, with the surplus being used to fund bridge repairs, bolster literacy programs and address the transportation system’s budget deficit."

Taxing the rich works!
Millionaire Tax That Inspired Mamdani Fuels $5.7 Billion Haul in Massachusetts
A millionaire levy in Massachusetts that New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani holds up as a model for taxing the rich has generated $3 billion more in revenue than expected without forcing...
www.bloomberg.com
October 23, 2025 at 10:25 AM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
Integrated prediction of RNA secondary structure jointly with 3D motifs and pseudoknots guided by evolutionary information.
@aakaran31.bsky.social and @rivaselenarivas.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
All-at-once RNA folding with 3D motif prediction framed by evolutionary information - Nature Methods
Structural RNAs exhibit a vast array of recurrent short three-dimensional (3D) elements found in loop regions involving non-Watson–Crick interactions that help arrange canonical double helices into tertiary structures. Here we present CaCoFold-R3D, a probabilistic grammar that predicts these RNA 3D motifs (also termed modules) jointly with RNA secondary structure over a sequence or alignment. CaCoFold-R3D uses evolutionary information present in an RNA alignment to reliably identify canonical helices (including pseudoknots) by covariation. Here we further introduce the R3D grammars, which also exploit helix covariation that constrains the positioning of the mostly noncovarying RNA 3D motifs. Our method runs predictions over an almost-exhaustive list of over 50 known RNA motifs (‘everything’). Motifs can appear in any nonhelical loop region (including three-way, four-way and higher junctions) (‘everywhere’). All structural motifs as well as the canonical helices are arranged into one single structure predicted by one single joint probabilistic grammar (‘all-at-once’). Our results demonstrate that CaCoFold-R3D is a valid alternative for predicting the all-residue interactions present in a RNA 3D structure. CaCoFold-R3D is fast and easily customizable for novel motif discovery and shows promising value both as a strong input for deep learning approaches to all-atom structure prediction as well as toward guiding RNA design as drug targets for therapeutic small molecules.
link.springer.com
October 3, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.
October 5, 2025 at 9:08 AM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna tells Jeffrey Goldberg that vaccinations have been so successful that "there's been a collective forgetting that measles, and mumps, and rubella—these used to be diseases that would kill people in fairly large numbers." #TAF25 bit.ly/46a5DUE
September 18, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
This year's Lasker Awards went to scientists who studied the wiring diagram of life, a new state of biological matter, and a potent treatment for cystic fibrosis. Here's my story with Gina Kolata. Gift link: nyti.ms/4mZlH1F
nyti.ms
September 11, 2025 at 1:30 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
News in the history of molecular biology. The Science History Institute in Philadelphia has acquired a huge archive of correspondence and other scientific material from the pioneers of molecular biology (Franklin, Klug, Perutz, Delbrück etc, with items from Crick and Watson, too). 1/n
History of Molecular Biology Collection
This unparalleled collection includes Rosalind Franklin's historic 'Photo 51,' which revealed the double-helix structure of DNA.
www.sciencehistory.org
September 8, 2025 at 12:28 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career relying on American science and engineering to keep me alive. Yesterday, RFK Jr. testified at the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. It was sad to see him try to destroy the life’s work of so many American scientists. He shouldn’t be in this job.
September 5, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
In these dark times, it comes as a rare pleasure to highlight @natanaels.bsky.social ‬ & @marcdemanuel.bsky.social's work on germline and somatic mutations in humans. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
Collateral mutagenesis funnels multiple sources of DNA damage into a ubiquitous mutational signature
Mutations reflect the net effects of myriad types of damage, replication errors, and repair mechanisms, and thus are expected to differ across cell types with distinct exposures to mutagens, division ...
www.biorxiv.org
September 2, 2025 at 11:44 AM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
New research offers a glimpse of how RNA might have helped form the first simple proteins—an event that could have set the stage for evolution. https://scim.ag/4mVxEok
Here’s how the first proteins might have assembled, sparking life
RNA could have helped amino acids join up without preexisting protein machinery, lab study suggests
scim.ag
August 27, 2025 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
Spatiotemporal NAIL-MS analysis shows that ALKBH5 does not affect global m6A turnover in human mRNA across subcellular compartments under standard growth conditions bit.ly/4lvVtC6
August 27, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Reposted by Alex Palazzo
Want to know how lipidation of some nascent chains takes place by NMT2-- Check our latest work on how NAC couples Protein Synthesis with Nascent Polypeptide Myristoylation on the Ribosome out today @embojournal.org‬: www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....
August 26, 2025 at 11:00 AM