Annika Barber

@annikabarber.bsky.social

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Drosophila enthusiast. Assistant Professor of Mol Bio and Biochem at Rutgers U. Runner. Uses brain to think about brains. All around curious person.

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After trying Turkish delight, I didn't understand why Edmund sold out his siblings for it. But my GS brought back *very fancy* Turkish delight from Mecca for the lab, and I understand now. #narnia

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Annika Barber

I'm working on policy proposals to protect consumer rights when companies brick smart devices. So please share devices that you've owned that stopped working because the company that made it killed software support or went out of business. Also, please share this request. Thank you.

🧪 #papersofnote The Bonini lab identifies AP1+ glial cells as bona fide senescent cells in vivo, and then uses then to interrogate what makes some cells become senescent. It turns out a little senescence is necessary, but reducing glial senescence extends lifespan. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Senescent glia link mitochondrial dysfunction and lipid accumulation - Naturedoi.org The authors identify naturally occurring senescent glia in aged Drosophila brains and decipher their origin and influence, determining that they can appear in response to neuronal mitochondrial dysfun...

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Annika Barber

we have to reckon with the fact that, in the past, a lot of people actually worked their way up to leadership positions. yes, yes, peter principle, not perfect, blah blah. but now, they all come straight from business school, where they are filled to overflowing with nothing but absolute bullshit

I'm reading memos and letters to the university community from presidents who are implementing draconian budget cuts this year (for a project I'm working on) and good god the amount of obfuscatory and weasel-wordy business-speak in these things is making me grind my teeth into dust

🧪 #papersofnote Chronobiologists are all about the core clock trx-translation feedback loop, but clock genes also control chromatin accessibility! The Clowney and Yadlapalli labs team up to to ATACseq on fly clock neurons and identify distinct dawn and dusk motifs. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Clock-dependent chromatin accessibility rhythms regulate circadian transcriptiondoi.org Author summary The intricate organization of chromatin is crucial for orchestrating precise gene expression patterns throughout various biological processes such as development and differentiation. In...

My friends are cooler than me, and they just go edit proteins inside living cells! Also George has possibly the most colorful vocabulary of profanity of anyone I know. A man of many talents. 🧪

Ever wanted to edit a protein sequence inside a living mammalian cell? Maybe to site specifically incorporate a non-canonical residue? Perhaps you’d like to do a pull down without an antibody? Or use a small molecule fluorophore to image an endogenous protein? 1/4

🧪 #papersofnote Sleep is regulated by both circadian and homeostatic processes. Examining 7 Drosophila species, the Gilestro lab finds that all species have circadian regulation of sleep, but homeostatic sleep rebound after deprivation is not conserved. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Divergent evolution of sleep in Drosophila species - Nature Communicationsdoi.org We all feel tired without sleep, but we still don’t know why. Is tiredness a crucial, evolutionarily conserved feature of sleep? Joyce et al. show that some species have circadian but not homeostatic ...

It's my turn for a "thrilled to announce" post! My NIH ESI MIRA grant investigating sex differences in circadian output signaling has been funded! For context I have submitted three unfunded R01s before this application hit.

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Annika Barber

Me when I finish a really good book and idk what to do with my spare time anymore

Gordita Crunch time!

Thanks to this paper, my husband - who has an M.Div. and an M.Ed. in sex and gender studies- ordered the Fair Play cards to check out for use in pre-marital counseling and a course he teaches on communication and gender. A rare confluence of academic interests! 😝

This study used the Fair Play cards (check them out: www.fairplaylife.com) to survey mothers about cognitive and instrumental labor for 30 common tasks. The 322 women surveyed were generally partnered, white, and college educated and all had at least 1 child.

Home | Fair Play Lifewww.fairplaylife.com

🧪 #papersofnote I am a behavioral geneticist taking a lil' foray into social psych because @darbysaxbe.bsky.social and colleagues attempt to quantify how much cognitive household labor impacts maternal mental health and relationship quality. I love a quantitative metric! doi.org/10.1007/s007...

Cognitive household labor: gender disparities and consequences for maternal mental health and wellbeing - Archives of Women's Mental Healthdoi.org Purpose Although the division of unpaid household labor has been studied as a driver of global gender inequity, the cognitive dimension of household labor—planning, anticipating, and delegating househ...

I became a scientist so I could mess with bug brains. And yet it is 11 am the day before a holiday an I'm in a meeting with a "director of procurement" and a "director of strategic sourcing" about our horrific new LabViva system. ☹️

🧪 If you do your own paper-a-day threads, tag me! I'd love to follow you and see more science talk that is about the science, not only the doing of science and the mechanics of academia (though I also want to see those things)

🧪 If you want to get started on your own summer reading challenge here are my top tips from several years of reading more papers than the average scientist (who isn't a journal editor) reads! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Annika’s guide to how to read a paper every day for a year (YMMV)docs.google.com Annika’s guide to how to read a paper every day for a year (YMMV) Accountability. For me, publicly declaring I’m doing something puts pressure on me to actually do it. I did this by tweeting out my ...

🧪 What is #papersofnote ? Back in 2020, I took the papers365 challenge - reading a paper a day for a year and tweeting a summary. And then another year. And then a third year! You can see all the papers I've editorialized here, organized by tabs: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Annika's Papers365docs.google.com 2024 Reccs First,Sex,Last,Sex,Year,Journal,Title,Organism,Keyword,DOI Zhang,Kim,M,2024,Fly,The astrocyte-enriched gene deathstar plays a crucial role in the development, locomotion, and lifespan of D...

And if you are a Serious Academic who doesn't want my other random blithering, I'm tagging my paper summaries with #papersofnote in the first tweet so you can curate those for yourself. But I skeet what I want and make no guarantees about my other content! 😜

Giving your gene a Star Wars name is a good way to get on #papersofnote. Using existing fly RNAseq data, this paper identifies deathstar, a gene expressed in eaat1+ astrocyte-like glia. Glial knockdown of deathstar affects lifespan and locomotion. doi.org/10.1080/1933...

The astrocyte-enriched gene deathstar plays a crucial role in the development, locomotion, and lifespan of D. melanogasterdoi.org The Drosophila melanogaster brain is a complex organ with various cell types, orchestrating the development, physiology, and behaviors of the fly. While each cell type in Drosophila brain is known ...

#papersofnote is back for weekdays in July! Dif is an NF-kB trx factor homologous to mammalian Rels. Loss of Dif (mutants, transhets) reduces daily sleep, increases latency to sleep at night, and reduces sleep rebound after mechanical deprivation. doi.org/10.1093/slee...

The NFκB Dif is required for behavioral and molecular correlates of sleep homeostasis in Drosophiladoi.org Abstract. The nuclear factor binding the κ light chain in B-cells (NFκB) is involved in a wide range of cellular processes including development, growth, i

After 4+ years of ass-prof-ing, I have inured my institute director to my shenanigans. Popped into his office in a frog headband this morning, and he didn't even blink. At this point he probably wouldn't be surprised if I turn out to actually be a dozen frogs in a trench coat!

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If you're teaching Scientific Writing this fall, and especially if it's a new course for you - this your periodic reminder that all my course materials are available for you to borrow/modify/whatever! scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/s...

Steal this (updated) syllabus for Scientific Writingscientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com I’ve just finished the 3rd go-around of my Scientific Writing course. When I first signed up to teach it, I was very scared, but now that I’ve been through it a few times, I’m quite pleased with how ...

I read @aptshadow.bsky.social 's Children of Time series and it was SO GOOD and also had the BEST BUGS and I didn't dare read anything of his ever again, because how could it possible rival CoT? But after two years, I started the Final Architecture series and I'm hooked again (fewer buggos tho).

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einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter: (1) your haters are trash (2) you’re a baller, a true queen (3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️

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Annika Barber

Let's talk about the fish with flashlight eyes. Anomalops katoptron, the Splitfin flashlightfish, has pouches under each eye filled with bioluminescent bacteria. It has a built in reflector & shutter to direct the light or conceal it at will. For years, we didn't know why.

Gift from a departing student. Will be changing my signature to Annika Barber, PhD, Bug Enthusiast ASAP. I swear I’m not responsible for the cult tho. 💜 🪲

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Annika Barber

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Charm City Slicker (58-38)

Maybe I am abnormal in this way but my only "vexing problem" with my "medium friends" is that I don't keep in touch with them 1:1 as much as I want to. they aren't a burden, I love them and want to spend more of my earthly existence with them

Every time I walk into a wall, my husband reminds me I’m a doctor. 😂 I’m very smart about a very small subset of things.

The idea of “PhD level intelligence” is very funny to me, personally, because I have worked with scientists for 20 years. I know someone who has helped find treatments for diseases we didn’t even think were possible and also struggled to understand how the hot tap of a water cooler worked.

It’s been wonderful to stay in the lives of kids I used to work with as a court appointed special advocate (CASA). Watched one of my favorite young ladies graduate 8th grade today, surrounded by her mom and the extended family who have stepped up to parent her. This is community. 💜 #fostercare

Waited 6 weeks to see my primary care doc. Had to fill out pages of online forms in advance. Why don’t I just put in the diagnosis codes and write my own prescription? That would really save time! And yes, I did submit this as the “probable cause” for my sciatica.

I can’t believe my first two undergrads (who stayed on as postbaccs) are leaving us! 😭 Their embroideries are done in time for their farewell party. #drosophila #sciart

Not me with my hard drive of Star Wars despecialized editions that I share with my friend! #attacked

And, weirdly, this same group of people are also the ones who also learned how to preserve their media the same way. Not *only* do they still talk to a person they met on ICQ 25 years ago, but they still have the same rip of a movie they pirated then too, or such.