May in tweets

YC Demo Day marked the beginning of Spring and a new chapter of growth for PLab. For two years (2014 and 2015) we operated not just as a lean startup, but as an ultra-lean startup — you could call it budgetary caloric restriction. Read more about how we made the transition, and the role YC played:

The 7th full-time PLab team member, Feba Sam, joined us last month. With Feba coming on board, PLab’s core team of scientists is now majority women. She wasted no time getting assays to work:

Tom’s and Tamy’s painstaking efforts over the last 5 months to upgrade PLab’s platform capabilities for fly screens started to pay off. They worked closely with Peter Sands, founder of Modular Science, built a custom fly imaging rig. The plate images below are the fruits of their labor:

Nina took to the blog to summarize recent data on the role of autophagy in Niemann-Pick C. This post was written in anticipation of the Ara Parseghian Medical Research Foundation’s 22nd annual meeting in Tucson, which I attended (and dutifully livetweeted; more on that in next month’s LMiT):

My friend and unflagging rare disease advocate Oli Rayner brought to my attention a very interesting paper on a yeast model of cystic fibrosis. What makes this paper special is that is demonstrated the evolutionary conservation of a genetic modifier from yeast to human cells, specifically bronchial epithelial cells:

See you next month!