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Connor Horton

@connorhorton.bsky.social
326 followers 422 following 24 posts

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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Reposted by Connor Horton
Nick Ingolia @nickingolia.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
We are searching for a technician to work on disordered proteins and regulatory networks involved in mRNA regulation! careerspub.universityofcalifornia.edu/psc/ucb/EMPL...
careerspub.universityofcalifornia.edu
Careers
The Departments of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) and Integrative Biology (IB) together are among the largest academic departments at UC Berkeley. By several measures (including number of faculty and students, budget, and assigned square feet), these departments are larger than many UCB colleges and schools. The two departments represent over 186 faculty FTE (including Adjuncts, Professors of the Graduate School, active emeriti and 15 HHMI professors); 150 postdocs and other research positions; 375 graduate students; 80 department staff members; and 8 recharge centers. Financial resources include approximately $51M in annual extramural funding (which accounts for over half of the total sponsored research awards in the College of Letters & Science) and over $46M other fund sources. The department has 1,800 declared undergraduate majors (the largest majors on the Berkeley campus) and a total annual enrollment in classes of ~20,000. Department personnel are currently housed in seven buildings located in three widely separated parts of the campus.
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Reposted by Connor Horton
The Ohainle Lab @ohainlelab.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Very excited to share the first preprint from the Ohainle Lab at UC Berkeley! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
CypA is a molecular barrier to HIV emergence from Eastern chimpanzees
Of the two lineages of lentivirus that endemically infect chimpanzees, only one has served as a source of infections in hu-mans. Using HIV-CRISPR screening, we identify factors that limit the replicat...
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Connor Horton @connorhorton.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
I'm excited to share our work providing the first complete mechanistic picture of how R2 proteins nick the second strand, out today in @pnas.org! ✂️🧬 This step in retrotransposition has long been mysterious, but crucial for understanding R2's. Check it out: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... A thread 🧵:
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Nozhat @nozhathassan.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
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...
link.springer.com
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...
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Reposted by Connor Horton
Nature Biotechnology @natbiotech.nature.com · 11/03/2026
Engineered TnpB genome editors for plants and human cells identified by ribonucleoprotein mutational scanning - @savagecatsonly.bsky.social go.nature.com/4loaOGn
go.nature.com
Engineered TnpB genome editors for plants and human cells identified by ribonucleoprotein mutational scanning - Nature Biotechnology
TnpB endonucleases are engineered for improved genome editing.
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Akanksha Thawani, PhD @akankshathawani.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
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
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cryoEM papers @cryoempapers.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
Structures of vertebrate R2 retrotransposon complexes during target-primed reverse transcription and after second-strand nicking pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40540573/ #cryoEM
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Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
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."
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Reposted by Connor Horton
Nozhat @nozhathassan.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
A big chunk of my PhD work with the Collins lab is now on bioRxiv!
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Reposted by Connor Horton
Polly Fordyce @pollyfordyce.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
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)
berkeleystanfordnextgensymposium.com
Stanford.Berkeley.UCSF Next Generation Faculty Symposium
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bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
Lineage-Specific Evolution, Structural Diversity, and Activity of R2 Retrotransposons in Animals www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
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UC Berkeley MCB @berkeleymcb.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
Congrats to MCB's Kathy Collins on her election to the National Academy of Sciences! 👏🎉https://www.nasonline.org/news/2025-nas-election/
Kathleen Collins elected to the National Academy of Sciences
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Ollie Rando @epididymosome.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
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
elifesciences.org
Deep sequencing of yeast and mouse tRNAs and tRNA fragments using OTTR
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Innovative Genomics Institute @innovativegenomics.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
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!
Jennifer Doudna speaking at Stand Up for Science in Berkeleycrowd at Stand Up for Science in Berkeleycrowd at Stand Up for Science in Berkeleycrowd at Stand Up for Science in Berkeley
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Reposted by Connor Horton
Savage Lab @savagecatsonly.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
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)
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Stanford Department of Bioengineering @bioe-stanford.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
🚀 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
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Vikram Paralkar @paralkarlab.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
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....
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Polly Fordyce @pollyfordyce.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
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....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
FACS‐Sortable Triple Emulsion Picoreactors for Screening Reactions in Biphasic Environments
Biphasic reactions can enhance reactions where the catalyst and substrate have different solvent preferences. This study optimizes triple emulsion picoreactors that encapsulate a biphasic solvent env...
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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 01/02/2024
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
science.org
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.
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 06/12/2023
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
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Liana Lareau @lianafaye.bsky.social · 29/11/2023
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...
biorxiv.org
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
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Di Jiang @dijiang319.bsky.social · 03/10/2023
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
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James Fraser @fraserlab.com · 04/10/2023
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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Connor Horton @connorhorton.bsky.social · 21/09/2023
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):
science.org
Short tandem repeats bind transcription factors to tune eukaryotic gene expression
Transcription factors directly bind repetitive sequences that need not resemble known motifs.
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