Connor Horton

@connorhorton.bsky.social

PhD candidate in Collins Lab at Berkeley MCB, studying mechanism and evolution of transposable elements. Formerly Fordyce Lab @ Stanford and Park Lab @ Harvard. (he/him) 🧬🏳️‍🌈

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After a long time finding reviewers, my paper on the evolution of R2 retrotransposons is out! This project was in collaboration with my amazing co-authors Bri and Anthony from the Collins lab. 🐢🐦‍⬛ Big thanks to my team, especially my supervisor Dave Adelson! #TEsky link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Lineage-specific evolution, structural diversity, and activity of R2 retrotransposons in animals - Genome Biology

Background Retrotransposons play outsized roles in the evolution of gene regulation, genome function, and disease pathogenesis, and more recently they have sparked interest as instruments for new gene...

link.springer.com

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....

Nature Biotechnology@natbiotech.nature.com · 2y ago

Transgenes are inserted into human cells by 2-RNA delivery of a retroelement protein and template go.nature.com/3utPERu rdcu.be/d8LVW

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

Changing fitness effects of mutations through long-term bacterial evolution

Predictable and parallel changes occur in the fitness effects of mutations in Escherichia coli over 50,000 generations.

science.org

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...

Codon optimality modulates protein output by tuning translation initiation

bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

biorxiv.org

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!

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