Vertebrate retrotransposons are the future of gene therapy. But how do they insert their genes? 🔥🔥

Thrilled to share our new work now published with Kathy Collins, @nogaleslab.bsky.social @berkeleymcb.bsky.social where we investigate this with #cryoEM & biochemistry in 🧪 and cells! #RNAsky #TEsky

Structures of vertebrate R2 retrotransposon complexes during target-primed reverse transcription and after second-strand nicking pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40540573/ #cryoem

An NIH staffer reacts to today's ruling:
"I'm looking forward to the day that we are so slammed with work trying to reinstate everything that we had to terminate illegally — I'll work 24/7 to make that happen if I can."

A big chunk of my PhD work with the Collins lab is now on bioRxiv!

Are you a postdoc/grad student preparing to launch a faculty search? Do you have a track record of excellence in research, leadership, mentorship & community engagement? Apply to the 2025 Next Generation Faculty Symposium: www.berkeleystanfordnextgensymposium.com! Pls repost! (1/3)

Lineage-Specific Evolution, Structural Diversity, and Activity of R2 Retrotransposons in Animals https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.05.652312v1

Congrats to MCB's Kathy Collins on her election to the National Academy of Sciences! 👏🎉https://www.nasonline.org/news/2025-nas-election/

It is finally (FINALLY) out! We characterized Kathy Collin's super cool OTTR protocol for tRNA and tRF cloning, showing that it is comparable (mim-tRNA-seq, maybe nano-tRNA -seq and LIDAR) or superior (everything else) to the best protocols in the literature.

elifesciences.org/articles/77616

Thanks to out @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social community for joining us at Stand Up For Science! @jenniferdoudna.bsky.social spoke about how NIH funding supported her PhD & NSF funding supported her development of #CRISPR genome editing. Federal funding is needed for life-saving science!

What's better than 1 deep mutational scanning (DMS) library? 2! In a new pre-print @brittneywthornton.bsky.social and @rfw.bsky.social et al. map the mutational landscape of ISDra2 TnpB protein and reRNA and leverage these datasets to engineer highly active variants (1/9)

🚀 Meet Eliel Akinbami, a Stanford BioE PhD student in @pollyfordyce.bsky.social Lab! Their research has led to HT-MEK (High-Throughput Microfluidic Enzyme Kinetics), a groundbreaking technique that condenses years of enzyme research work into just weeks. 🔬 @stanford-chemh.bsky.social #stanfordbioe

I was stunned by this work from Kathleen Collins' lab (Berkeley) when I heard her present this at a FASEB meeting!

What a crazy innovative idea: Adapting the R2 retrotransposon to efficiently insert any custom transgene directly into RIBOSOMAL DNA ARRAYS! 🤯🤯🤯

The applications are endless....

Many industrially-important reactions (e.g. lipase-catalyzed biofuel production) involve substrates poorly soluble in water. How can we screen enzymes for these reactions? Samuel Thompson invented a new 'triple emulsion' platform for biphasic screening (1/n):
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

A new LTEE paper is out. They don't use the term "adjacent possible," but the idea is there.

As populations accumulated mutations, "some evolutionary paths that were inaccessible to the ancestor became accessible to the evolving populations, while others were closed off."

🦋🦫🌱🐋🧪 #philsci #evobio

A big step forward in the science of aging: organ-specific tracking via plasma proteins
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
20% of people assessed had accelerated aging in 1 organ, 1.7% multi-organ

Spurred on by ribosome profiling and other cool methods, translation elongation has grown into a whole field with new surprises all the time (and new relevance for vaccine mRNAs!). Here’s our latest on why synonymous codons aren’t all the same. (Thread) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Short tandem repeats (STRs) are common in eukaryotic genomes. Horton et al. in Science show transcription factors (TFs) directly bind STRs by a additive model - low-affinity bindings amount to large effects suggesting STRs tune TF binding and regulate gene expression bit.ly/add1250 bit.ly/adk2055

I see this all the time - you don't need to wait for a journal to ask you to review - JUST REVIEW THE PREPRINT and post your review!

We do it all the time: fraserlab.com/reviews

The majority of the time, a journal asks us to include the review in their process AFTER we post!

Check out our paper and the accompanying perspective by Kuhlman published today in Science about the surprising role of short tandem repeats in regulating eukaryotic transcription!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A thread (1/11):