Imprints on our Biology that Determine our Behavior Our recent study in Cell Reports is big step forward towards our vision of integrating naturalistic behavior, machine learning and genetics to understand the cellular and molecular basis of mammalian decisions and actions. This is important work, since our behavior, including our decisions and actions, are the … Read more

How to do Better Science - The New SEAL Program for Professional Scientists A Shift Is Happening. Too Many Papers are Being Published. The Easy Problems have been Solved. Science is Now all about Impact.   Small Elite Interdisciplinary Teams Will Lead in this New World.   With this change in mind, the Gregg lab ... Read more

It is good to regularly reflect on your life plan, perspectives and progression. A logical time to do it is during the Christmas and New Years break. I like to write and store this in Evernote, so it easy to find. Here are some questions I recommend answering as you prepare for the year. Look … Read more

A postdoctoral fellow in my lab recently got an outstanding tenure-track faculty position with a great startup package and hard salary. This is so exciting! But at the same time, I hear of trainees overcome with fear because they feel the road to a tenure-track position is simply too hard and competitive. This is worrisome … Read more

The science website, STATnews , runs an annual competition called STAT madness to select the biggest and best science idea of the year. Go here to read about the STAT madness competition for 2019 and the contenders for this year’s crown. Our accelerated evolution paper (published in Cell Reports last year) has been selected as one of … Read more

A LEAN CANVAS-STYLE APPROACH TO DEVELOPING GREAT GRANTS AND PROJECTS   Writing a great grant or designing a transformative new project is hard work and many issues need to be considered carefully. An idea for grant application/project will typically go through many, many iterations before something great emerges. During this process, many different ideas and … Read more

Creative science involves obsessive information gathering and thinking to generate a lot of ideas. Most ideas are partially or completely bad/wrong in their initial form. It takes years of sculpting to chisel out a great knowledge product. You do not want to spend years pursuing bad/wrong ideas, but in most cases it is not immediately … Read more

Illumina selected our work as the focus for a recent short documentary film for their Adventures in Genomics YouTube channel. It is about our work analyzing the genomes of different species to decode the noncoding parts of the genome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAvXSsaV3yU

Here is the cover submission image for Elliott’s new paper. It is one of the most read Cell Press papers in the last 30 days. Congrats to Elliott for all his hard work! More exciting work is coming…

Why Sex? Science has an answer. This talk discusses the Gregg lab’s discoveries on gene expression and epigenetics at the allele and cellular level:

During a recent meeting I had the pleasure of talking with Iain Patten, a professional science writer in Europe. Iain travels throughout Europe teaching scientists how to write high impact papers.

The factors that contribute to the development of common diseases have been challenging to define. Epigenetic mechanisms may play a role and the field is hopeful that epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) studies will gain new insights.

An important new paper on the methodology for doing gene co-expression network analysis was recently published in PLoS ONE by Kumari et al. (2012).  The paper is entitled “Evaluation of Gene Association Methods for Coexpression Network Construction and Biological Knowledge Discovery”.

Dr. Coni Horndli has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation.  Dr. Horndli is a postdoctoral fellow in the Gregg Lab developing novel approaches to study genetic and epigenetic pathways in the brain that modulate complex feeding and foraging behaviors. 

An Exon Splice Enhancer Primes IGF2:IGF2R Binding Site Structure and Function Evolution   Christopher Williams,1* Hans-Jürgen Hoppe,2* Dellel Rezgui,2 Madeleine Strickland,1 Briony E. Forbes,3 Frank Grutzner,3 Susana Frago,2 Rosamund Z. Ellis,1 Pakorn Wattana-Amorn,1 Stuart N. Prince,2 Oliver J. Zaccheo,2 Catherine M. Nolan,4 Andrew J. Mungall,5 E. Yvonne Jones,6 Matthew P. Crump,1† A. Bassim Hassan2†

By:  Dr. Coni Horndli PhD. This recent study in Cell from Brad Lowell’s group reveals novel circuits in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus that selectively drive energy expenditure.

By:  Dr. Paul Bonthuis PhD.   Two simultaneous reports by Garrison et al. and Beets et al. in last week’s issue of Science discovered a C. elegans peptide neurotransmitter, and two cognate receptors, with genetic, structural, and functional similarity to the mammalian oxytocin/vasopressin (and non-mammalian vertebrate vasotocin) signaling systems.

Good news!  The Gregg Lab is happy to announce that Christopher Gregg has been named a NYSCF-Robertson Neuroscience Investigator by the New York Stem Cell Foundation.

Great science writing might be described as a strange form of poetry that brings beautiful ideas to life with piercing clarity and purpose.  Getting good at this is a career long endeavour. 

One of the first steps in graduate school is to figure out what you want to study and in which lab you want to do your research. Lab rotations typically involve working in ~3 different labs for 1-2 months each.

When breaking into neuroscience and genomics, it is the concepts that are so important to get hold of.  Conceptual innovation is a primary goal of basic biology. 

Several papers have emerged over the last year or so indicating transgenerational effects that influence the behavior and/or physiology of offspring.

The evidence that parents pass epigenetic information on to their offspring and that information influences offspring physiology and behavior is continuing to grow.

My postdoctoral studies from Catherine Dulac’s laboratory at Harvard have finally been published as two companion papers in the August 6th issue of Science [Gregg et al., Science 2010; Gregg et al., Science 2010b].

The goal of any experiment is to address a specific question such that the results will be reproducible and serve as a solid foundation for further thoughts and experimental work.

For myself and my future trainees, I am using this blog entry to reflect on the principle components of the path to discovery in bench science.

The leading theoretical explanation for the evolution of genomic imprinting is the Kinship Theory, which was proposed by David Haig here at Harvard in 1989.

Genomic imprinting is one of the most provocative and exciting fields of research falling under the umbrella of “epigenetics”.Imprinting is thought to be a rare, but extraordinarily important mode of gene regulation in the genome and is the primary focus of my research.For this post, I am putting up an excerpt from Brady Weissbourd’s undergraduate thesis.

For some, the term “neural conflict” might arouse images of severe headache pain or perhaps situational conundrums such as whether or not to have just one more piece of chocolate cake.