Connor Horton

Check out our paper and the accompanying perspective by Kuhlman published today in @ScienceMagazine about the surprising role of short tandem repeats in regulating eukaryotic transcription! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… A thread (1/11):

Check out new work from @CollinsRNPLab on the RNA requirements of R2 retroelements led by star grad student Anthony!

Do human RNA-binding proteins have modular regulatory domains that downregulate RNA lifetimes? Our preprint @BintuLab studying this question is now out on bioRxiv, where we indeed identify small domains in RBPs that potently induce RNA degradation! biorxiv.org/content/10.110… (1/9)

Interested in high-throughput enzyme expression & characterization? Check out @BLEE9239's new preprint describing DA-MEK, which employs hydrophilic/omniphobic surfaces to create droplet arrays compatible w/ cell-free protein synthesis! biorxiv.org/content/10.110… (1/n)

Thrilled to be a part of the Méndez family and looking forward to the symposium!

Congratulations to our very own Polly Fordyce @fordycelab for receiving @Stanford 2024 President’s Award for Excellence Through Diversity!

For the love of God people just do some experiments, enough with the single cell seq atlases

It was such a pleasure working with @rosajylee on this project! Check it out!

How to pick a problem. Today in @CellCellPress. 1/53 cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

Institute Scholar Polly Fordyce @fordycelab, Connor Horton, and team uncovered how highly repetitive regions of "junk" DNA may be linked to a newly discovered mechanism for gene regulation: bit.ly/3VEXlza

Daniel Kahneman was creative by never being content with what had already been achieved. He told us on the @nightsciencepod how to (1) suspend your critical weapons (2) give the mind something to work on while asleep & (3) have ‘adversarial collaborations’ podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan…

A retrotransposon for site-specific gene transfer #NBTNV go.nature.com/4co04Ty

What are the best AI research assistants? Would love a tool that I could ask questions like "find papers with experiment x in model system y", or "has anyone published x + y + z"? Currently using Consensus and its great but fails this type of task most of the time.

How did we lose our tail? A simple question.. but it wasn't really asked before! We discovered a plausible scenario for the genetic mechanism that led to tail loss. Amazing that such a big change may have been caused by such a small genetic event. nature.com/articles/s4158… @BoXia7

Wrote a 1-pager for @NatureRevGenet on how we should stop pretending transcription factor binding sites are a discrete entity. Just like a cup exists in many states between "full" and "empty", TFBSs are continuous. rdcu.be/dzL8o - feat. sweet new paper from @EKFarley

Retrotransposons found in the genomes of the white-throated sparrow and the zebra finch are shown to safely shepherd transgenes into the human genome, providing a gene therapy approach complementary to CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. @berkeleyMCB news.berkeley.edu/2024/02/20/jun…

Harnessing eukaryotic retroelement proteins for transgene insertion into human safe-harbor loci - @CollinsRNPLab go.nature.com/3utPERu

Bird bird bird, bird is the word! Is the secret to safe gene addition a retroelement in birds? We repurposed the avian R2 element to insert transgenes into human cells (and more!) using RNA-only delivery 🪶 a thread 🧵 nature.com/articles/s4158…

pretty cool work from the @CollinsRNPLab , congrats to the team on this needed addition to the editing toolkit

Fantastic work by my @CollinsRNPLab colleagues on engineering R2 retrotransposons for gene insertion in safe-harbor loci of human cells! 🔥🤩 nature.com/articles/s4158…