Laura White
@laurakwhite
Colorado RNA biologist & tRNA enthusiast exploring the wild frontiers of nanopore direct RNA sequencing at the intrepid venn diagram of northern blots & machine learning.
Sitting on some great news I can’t share publicly yet, so in the meantime, here’s a happy dog for your Friday.
Imagine pulling up next to what you think is the driver’s side of this little truck.
I filled out my family's college basketball pool bracket based on mascots' abilities to win in head to head competition, so now it's time to reshare the greatest picture ever taken of Uga, the University of Georgia's namesake bulldog.
Absolutely no user has ever asked this question upon learning about this system. None.
"we've added this new feature to the online training system, so let's answer some frequently asked questions about whether there's any point to it at all. sneak preview: no"
cannot wait until I get to level 4 and unlock the... blue triangle over the white oval
Well this is new. Now I want to know how many times to I have to take the university's IT security awareness quiz before I level up.
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.
This holiday we spun the wheel of countries & landed on St Vincent & the Grenadines, so it is time for Christmas ham, macaroni pie, rum punch, & (eventually) ponche de créme, accompanied by an Anthony Bourdain episode as the tradition decrees. Plus also the 1st Pirates of the Caribbean, filmed there
On Saturday my dog decided to roll in a dead squirrel so we had to bathe him and he has not smelled like himself for DAYS and I don’t know which of us this bothers more so thank you from both of us for the reminder to go look up fragrance free dog shampoo for this poor boy
The grad student organizers of Colorado's long-running RNA Club have been putting together this event to demystify the PhD application process for the past few years. Pass along to folks applying to grad school this cycle 🍁
Fun fact: the Japanese Spider Crab’s Latin name (M. kaempferi) refers to this 17th century Dutchman who “discovered” it in… a restaurant. 🙄
Another impressive dissection of tRNA modification consequences from Sarah Schultz in Ute Kothe's lab. Her work reveals that even though TrmA, TruB, or now DusA KOs show no overt growth phenotypes, modifications they deposit have real impacts on tRNA charging and codon-specific translation.
Stay tuned for more on all those fronts, plus all the fun stuff Aleks (who's not on Bluesky) is working on looking at the origins of tRNA synthetases in his postdoc with @joethorntonlab.bsky.social! I hope you all find a cool collaborator for that secret project you've been thinking about.
@jayhesselberth and I are really excited about having a direct window into charged tRNA supply so we can monitor the very building blocks that make protein synthesis possible. How does tRNA supply and demand change during stress? When and how are these molecules misaminoacylated?
Special shout-out to our PRA Kezia Dobson, who tackles everything I throw at her whether it’s nanopores or acid northern gels, as well as Marcin Sajek, who handled all early ML training at CU. Additional support from RBI alum Kent Riemondy and summer undergrad Sami del Pozo helped push this forward.
Key pieces of this solution: Flexizyme ground-truth controls (all Alex!), “chemical-charging northern” blots, machine learning calling of charged vs uncharged tRNA & add’l ML models that hit ~0.86 F1 on pairwise AA calls—first pass with room to grow. Huge team effort at @cuanschutz + @uchicago.
Once I got back to Denver we began outlining some ideas for him to test @uchicago. First data: clear signal shifts for 2 different amino acids and an uncharged synthetic tRNA control. We pulled in our PIs (Jack Szostak and @jayhesselberth) and worked up a library budding yeast.
I told him I didn’t know, but wanted to find out. Aleks then drew this. An origins of life RNA chemist, he’d already worked out a way to chemically ligated charged tRNAs, and wanted someone crazy enough to try nanopore sequencing them. I was deemed sufficiently competent + crazy, so scheming began.
Junior colleague: wow, that image looks TERRIBLE. Me: Well, it's a photo of a printout of a photo of a printout from a former postdoc's PhD lab's bulletin board Junior colleague: 😮...oh. no one appreciates the classics anymore and by classics, I mean this image showing where dyes migrate on gels
This dog just met the guy in our neighborhood who keeps a dog treat station outside his house where most of my neighbors would situate their little free library.