Pedro Beltrao’s Post

Interesting piece in this week's Nature on the various factors behind the success of the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Of particular note (I think): "Prioritizing small teams also optimizes the sharing of technologies and budgets and incentivizes scientists from different fields to converge on the same projects.... This connectivity often leads to rapid and creative combinations of ideas between teams. It also allows for the sharing of failure and resilience to it, which is inevitable in high-risk, high-stakes innovative research" "Because the LMB’s strategy focuses on long-term, transformational goals rather than short-term incremental gains, its internal evaluation system for researchers is more concerned with the potential of the overall scientific programme3 than with standard individual performance metrics, such as the number of journal publications and citations, personal impact factors, grant funding, awards and collaborations." https://lnkd.in/eewc2XJj

Editorial in Life Sciences Review highlights the importance of a biomimetic approach to life science research:

Excellent point! I've always complained about this whenever I designed a study. Aside from the points mentioned here, the fact that you can only report the interesting results can also lead to some unfortunate false reports! After all, your proposed method must perform better, doesn't it? 😉 However, with the current awarding system in academia which is based on the "number" of publications and citations, I think if we allow the negative results to be published, this will be exploited by those number hunters. Such a faulty loop we're in!

I fully agree with this. Do not keep negative results in drawers! For instance, if the answer to « does molecule X influence phenomenon Y?” is no, well ‘no’ is an important finding! We will soon publish a paper, accepted at #eNeuro, containing a majority of ‘negative’ data (i.e., no statistical difference identified)! Try this journal if you are hesitant to publish neuroscience findings that do not confirm your hypothesis.

If you have access to Nature Cell Biology, I want to bring your attention to this editorial (see below). It discusses some facts and observations that might seem obvious, but they've been slipping from our radar lately. It's especially important for decision-makers overseeing research funding to give it a read and consider where the money meant to unravel the mysteries of life and the universe is being allocated. https://lnkd.in/eXmCG4Nd

Thank you, Dr. Luisa Spisak, PhD, for sharing this post. I wholeheartedly agree.   Negative data is as valuable as positive results; it guides a field around dead ends and may reveal crucial biological information. I have a concrete example.   Freshly graduated with a Ph.D., I began my postdoc at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. My task was to create a mouse model of Ewing Sarcoma. For those unfamiliar with Ewing Sarcoma, it is the second most common pediatric bone-associated tumor driven by chromosomal translocations involving the EWS gene and those from the ETS family of transcription factors. After numerous attempts and failures, I attended a small meeting with the top scientists in the field. When I disclosed my challenges in creating the mouse model, other researchers shared their own attempts and failures.   Knowing about my peers' failures would have saved years in my early postdoc and resources for my mentor’s lab. We would have undoubtedly designed our studies differently. The fascinating aspect was that the negative results pointed to the biology of EWS-ETS fusion proteins in non-cancerous "normal" cells, which no one was sharing or thinking about.   Attempts at journals that focus on negative outcomes have fizzled as scientific readers gravitate towards papers with positive results. Perhaps if we prioritized collaboration over competition, scientists would be more willing to share both positive and negative information with their peers, benefiting everyone.

📢 DEADLINE for letters of intent: March 7 📢 https://lnkd.in/gAGGb3-N The “Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science” (FICUS) call between the JGI and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) is a unique opportunity for researchers to combine the power of genomics and molecular characterization in one proposed research project. Successful applications will focus on high risk/high payoff projects in the focused topic areas that can be completed on an accelerated timeline. In addition, they must utilize a broad range of the capabilities of each facility, and generate datasets beyond what each of these facilities could generate by itself. U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Berkeley Lab Biosciences Area (LBNLBioSci)

Preprint: "Here, we provide a set of recommendations for sharing code, with an eye toward guiding those who are comparatively new to applying open science principles to their computational work. Additionally, we review existing literature on the topic, summarize the most common tips, and evaluate the code-sharing policies of the most influential journals in biology, which occasionally encourage code-sharing but seldom require it." https://lnkd.in/dZhPVVR7

Exciting news! My latest research paper was published last week in the Journal of Computational Biology 📖. This paper is another consequence of the results produced during my doctoral studies. I want to express my gratitude to my co-authors, mentors, and everyone who supported me on this endeavor. If you're interested in reading the paper, you can access the peer-reviewed version here (unfortunately, it's not open access and it will require a subscription): https://lnkd.in/dX6_KvBQ. Alternatively, there is a pre-print version available on arXiv: https://lnkd.in/dDKrTFYh. #Research #Publication #AcademicAchievement

My goal as a science communicator is to cultivate a community where everyone feels like they belong in science. I combine my various areas of expertise in molecular biology, science education, (and being human) to create a fun space to learn and engage with science.