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Geoff Faulkner

@faulknerlab.bsky.social
516 followers 139 following 75 posts

Professor, University of Queensland. Retrotransposons and genomics. Views my own. Scholar publications: tinyurl.com/3k7r3xvj

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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Third, the experiments on the VH4-34 gene, which naturally lacks an upstream L1 (noL1) added an L1 (yesL1) but did not test a scrambled L1, or similar AT-rich sequence, or indeed a GC-rich sequence. Those controls would have been very helpful to rule out alternative explanations.
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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
This pattern of duplication is apparent in Figure S1. So the ancestral IGHV3 gene in this case had an L1 upstream of it and this L1-gene pair was duplicated, rather than a different L1 happening to insert at the same proximity and then be conserved, yes?
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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
The source rover ERV locus reminds me a lot of the human source L1 we found in Fig. 6 of PMID: 31230816 that had jumped in brain. Makes me think a lot of somatic mobility in eukaryotes may come from source 'escapee' elements that happen to land next to an active enhancer or promoter. 2/3
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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Had an excellent few days at the Frontiers in Epigenetics meeting in Kumamoto, hosted by Kazuya Iwamoto and Miki Bundo. Great science and company. Even got in a couple of runs around the city ... autumn seems to be late!
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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 30/01/2024
4. We tested the effects of expressing the reported Caps2.L1 fusion transcript in cultured mouse neuroblastoma (N2a) cells, surprisingly finding that this transcript greatly increased neuron morphological complexity, whilst the canonical Caps2 transcript did not.
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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 30/01/2024
3. Development of a human L1 5'UTR mGL promoter reporter assay, which we used to test the effects of SOX binding site mutations +/- SOX protein overexpression. SOX6 increased L1 promoter activity, but only if the first of the two L1 5'UTR SOX motifs was intact.
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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 30/01/2024
2. Development of a mouse L1 5'RACE assay (inspired by the human L1 5'RACE developed by Deininger) to capture full-length mRNAs, corroborated by L1 ORF1p immunostaining. These assays showed full length, protein coding L1 TF mRNAs were abundant in PV neurons.
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Geoff Faulkner @faulknerlab.bsky.social · 30/01/2024
Some of the additional data: 1. Development of a Cre-LoxP conditional mouse L1spa (cL1spa) mCherry retrotransposition reporter and its use in primary mouse neurons, showing L1 mobility in the PV lineage, in agreement with our earlier in vivo data from a transgenic human L1.3 EGFP reporter.
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