Matt Durrant
@mgdurrant
MGE whisperer. Scientist. Senior Fellow @FutureHouseSF. I post about programmable recombinases, AI for Bio, and being a dad. Open to collaborations!
Today was my last day at the @arcinstitute. I was the first scientific hire in 2021. It was incredible to see the institute go from just an idea to world-class science in such a short period of time. Very grateful to have worked with so many amazing scientists on several…
Can we use RNA to insert kilobases of DNA into the human genome, opening up a new way to engineer cells or treat disease? Excited to share our latest work turning a retrotransposon (a “jumping gene” with an RNA intermediate) from songbirds into a genome editing tool. 🧵 (1/7)
Surprised by how close this was. Delta doesn't even allow you to choose the middle seat as your preferred seat, sorry to the 2 people that chose that. The correct answer is aisle because you can unlatch the arm rest and get all the leg room you need.
What’s your preferred seat on a plane?
Our recent work on Actinobacterial G protein systems is live on bioRxiv! These regulatory systems are conserved in Actinomycetota and are involved in secondary metabolism, phage defense, and cellular development. Check out the preprint here: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Go work with Nick on one of the coolest RNA-guided enzymes ever discovered!
Happy to share that I'm continuing my research on bridge recombinases as a scientist in @pdhsu lab at the @arcinstitute! I am looking for a motivated post-grad to work with me as a research associate. If you are interested or know of someone, please use the link below:
Happy to share that I'm continuing my research on bridge recombinases as a scientist in @pdhsu lab at the @arcinstitute! I am looking for a motivated post-grad to work with me as a research associate. If you are interested or know of someone, please use the link below:
Me to my 9-year-old: Cheating is when you break your promise to love only one person. 9yo: Like Aphrodite and Ares? Me: What? 9yo: Aphrodite is married to Hephaestus but she secretly loves Ares.
Very happy with my decision to have an "office hours"-style calendly where anyone can sign up. Has resulted in really fun conversations.
Excited to announce that I’m starting a new position as a senior fellow @FutureHouseSF. I’ll be working on applying AI agents to metagenomic workflows. Very grateful for the opportunity to learn and explore my scientific interests. Please reach out if you’d like to collaborate!
Thank you to @markwbudde for giving me a tour of @plasmidsaurus HQ and explaining their “scrappy but scalable” approach to being the best in the business. A truly inspiring biotechnology success story!
I have to retract this somewhat. It got stuck staring at this ambulance for like 5 minutes, and it pretty frequently chooses terrible dropoff spots.
Now that the novelty has worn off, I can honestly say that @Waymo is the best thing ever.
Now that the novelty has worn off, I can honestly say that @Waymo is the best thing ever.
There's nothing quite like the feeling of starting a new research project!
Fungi consistently have genomes that are less than 50 million base pairs, including those that produce culinary mushrooms. Seems great for genome engineering!
A genomic perspective on fungal diversity and evolution | Nature Reviews Microbiology nature.com/articles/s4157…
We've always used lowercase p in pLM (Protein Language Models), to avoid confusion with the other popular acronym used in the protein field: PLM (Pseudo-Likelihood-Maximization). I'm guessing using lowercase g was inherited from this. 🤪
BioFMs aren’t just for humans 🦠 BGI plugs NT-50M & Evo‑7B embeddings into a cross‑attention boost, stacks a lightweight ensemble 👀 Gets 97.5 % accuracy at spotting soil probiotics from only 100 genome snippets
What are some private datasets that you really wish you had access to as a researcher?