hi reddit! I’m a graduate student in Curtis Suttle’s lab at the University of British Columbia (Canada) where our research focuses on aquatic microbiology. I study pathogens that infect protists – microscopic organisms living in aquatic environments. Amongst them are Giant Viruses that have challenged concepts of what constitutes a virus due to their enormous size and complexity. My research aims to explore the diversity and environmental role of these overlooked viruses. Further, I am interested in the evolutionary processes that have led to Giant Viruses reaching a complexity comparable to cellular organisms. In a recent paper published in the journal eLife, my colleagues and I isolated and characterized the giant Bodo saltans virus (BsV) that infects the protist Bodo saltans. Sequencing the genome of BsV revealed many previously unknown genes, a putative mechanism for genome expansion, and several unusual features, such as movable genetic elements that might help to fend off other Giant Viruses by cutting their genomes. You can read a plain-language summary of our findings. I’m here to answer questions related to our eLife paper or our research more broadly. I’ll start answering questions at 1pm EDT. AMA!

See the eLife flyer and this post for pictures! Daniel Himmelstein (@dhimmel on Reddit, Steem, and Twitter) – Hi Reddit! I’m a data scientist in Casey Greene’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Before this, I got my PhD in Biological & Medical Informatics at the University of California, San Francisco. One reason I took the job at Penn (watch me accept the job on YouTube) was because I wanted to continue advancing open science – the idea that science will progress most quickly if research is immediately open without barriers to reuse and collaboration. Sci-Hub is a website that brands itself as the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers. It is a controversial form of open science, because it infringes upon the copyright of publishers. However, it’s interesting because we think it will push scholarly publishing towards more open business models. Therefore, when Sci-Hub tweeted the list of every article in its database in March 2017, we began analyzing it openly on GitHub. Fast-forward almost a year and, after the publication of three preprint articles, we published our findings in the journal eLife with the title Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature. We also created a Stats Browser to help anyone explore the data. Casey Greene (@greenescientist on Reddit, Steem, and Twitter) – My research lab is in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania. Our primary focus is on developing machine learning methods to better understand human health and disease. I also run the Childhood Cancer Data Lab for Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, which is focused on integrating large-scale data to accelerate the pace of discovery. In addition to our research, I have an interest in the process of scientific communication, including our work studying Sci-Hub, our efforts to write a review paper entirely in the open via GitHub, and our biOverlay effort to launch an overlay for the life sciences. We’re here to answer questions about our eLife paper, or our work more broadly. We’ll start answering questions at 2pm EDT. AMA!

Hi Reddit About us: Dr. Cheryl Stucky: Hi! I am a Marvin Wagner Endowed Professor in the department of Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Anatomy, and the Neuroscience Doctoral Program Director, at the Medical College of Wisconsin. I am broadly interested in understanding touch and pain mechanisms. I have run a research laboratory for about 18 years at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where we use rodent models to study the mechanism of pain in diseases such as sickle cell disease, Fabry disease, arthritis and postsurgical pain. My lab also focuses on understanding how we sense touch, and we recently found out that our skin plays a large role in this. Building upon this knowledge, we are now investigating what role damaged skin plays in chronic pain conditions. The ultimate goal of our research is to identify new targets for which topical drugs can be developed in order to treat these pain conditions and avoid the negative side effects of many current treatments that are already out there. Francie Moehring: I am the senior graduate student in Cheryl’s laboratory. Many skin disorders such as dermatitis and psoriasis share a common hallmark: increased sensitivity or even pain to touch or normally unpainful stimuli. My project in the Stucky lab focuses on laying the foundation for understanding dysfunctional signaling processes during these disorders to potentially reveal new drug targets for topical treatments that directly target the site of pain. In order to study these processes, we are trying to understand how our skin, and the specific cells that form it, can interact with neurons and nerves within the skin that are typically involved in sensing mechanical stimuli from the environment. We’re here to answer questions about a recent paper we published in the journal eLife (https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31684?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=AMAFeb18; plain-language summary: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31684.002?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=AMAFeb18) – where we studied how our skin communicates with the nervous system – or queries related to our research more broadly. Please note that we are unable to provide any medical advice, as this goes beyond the scope of our research. We’ll start answering questions at 1pm EST. AMA!

Hi Reddit! I’m Teun Bousema and I’m an epidemiologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. My research focuses on understanding the transmission of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) – that is, how malaria-infected humans are able to infect mosquitoes. I lived and worked for many years in Kenya, Tanzania and the United Kingdom before moving to Radboud University Medical Center. One of the unique achievements of my department is the development of a safe controlled human infection model for malaria. In our current publication in eLife, we utilized this model to study the biology and transmission potential of controlled P. falciparum infections in Dutch volunteers who were exposed to malaria-infected mosquitoes. Our volunteers received treatment that controlled the pathogenic forms of malaria (and thus kept them safe) but stimulated the production of non-pathogenic transmissible stages of malaria parasites – the so-called gametocytes. We successfully induced gametocytes in all volunteers in sex ratios that resemble those observed in natural infections, and found that parasites start producing gametocytes immediately upon appearing in the bloodstream. Our model provides a new way to investigate malaria infection, and could help to test the impact of drugs and vaccines on gametocytes in the future. I look forward to talking more about our findings and anything related to my area of expertise more broadly. Together with Isaie Reuling, a clinician researcher and first author on the eLife manuscript, I’ll start answering questions at 2pm EDT. You can read the full eLife paper, and use the annotation tool to make notes and discuss the findings further. A plain-language summary is also available here. AMA!