Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 19/01/2025Me to son: You have way too many toys! Go pick one and we’ll donate it to charity. *10 minutes later* Me: woah woah woah slow down, too many memories with that one. 020
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 12/01/2025My wife woke up angry because Ariana Grande stole me from her in a dream. 020
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 12/01/2025As kids, my mom used to regularly take me and my sister to public recycling dumpsters, have us climb in, and we’d dig around to find coupons in magazines and newspapers. We were not poor. 010
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 19/12/2024My grandfather compiled a history of all of my ancestors on his side going back 5 generations, 62 people in total, some born in the mid 1700s. I can confirm that life is much better now than it was then. 020
Reposted by Matt DurrantAude Bernheim @audeber.bsky.social · 16/12/2024Out in NAR, AntiDefenseFinder & our "systematic" analysis of inhibitors of antiphage systems wt Bondy-Denomy lab led by @ftesson.bsky.social and E. Huiting. Not so "systematic" as very few known, fun stuff on MGE, antidefense islands and cool phages exaptations! academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...academic.oup.comExploring the diversity of anti-defense systems across prokaryotes, phages and mobile genetic elementsAbstract. The co-evolution of prokaryotes, phages and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) has driven the diversification of defense and anti-defense systems ali 011050
Reposted by Matt DurrantDmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 11/12/2024This whole story is amazing, intuitive in retrospect, and likely exceptionally important medically. Do read the paper and the whole thread! 1132
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 04/12/2024Isn’t the solution to ChatGPT doing everyone’s homework to just have more exams and to weight them more heavily? 000
Reposted by Matt DurrantHani Goodarzi @genophoria.bsky.social · 03/12/2024Come join us at @arcinstitute.org ! 0146
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 02/12/2024If the government is going to start banning food dyes and vaccines I only ask that they ban such things in a time-staggered way throughout the country so we can get some nice natural experiment data. 010
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 02/12/2024I hereby announce my candidacy for the presidency in 2028. If you vote for me, I will give you complete immunity for all crimes you commit between now and the end of my time in office. 010
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 27/11/2024Where can I get my hands on a woolly mammoth genome? Was expecting more than mitochondria on NCBI. 132
Reposted by Matt DurrantDiego del Alamo @delalamo.xyz · 25/11/2024Yet more evidence that transfer learning of sequence-only PLMs does not benefit from scale beyond 650M params 🧵 77820
Reposted by Matt DurrantSebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 25/11/2024Microbiology will always be one of the most satisfying fields of natural science. Nigh-infinite levels of biodiversity, perpetual room for novel findings, and an evergreen requirement for the advancement of human civilization. 10/10. Big fan. Would recommend. 🦠💪 1331335
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 25/11/2024That’s the last of my faculty applications! Now we wait🤞 110
Reposted by Matt DurrantMartin Steinegger 🇺🇦 @martinsteinegger.bsky.social · 23/11/2024Our Big Fantastic Virus Database (BFVD) is now published NAR! It contains protein structure predictions of major viral clades, enhanced by petabase-scale homology search and it's explorable on the web. 🌐 bfvd.foldseek.com 💾 bfvd.steineggerlab.workers.dev 📄 academic.oup.com/nar/advance-... 6339126
Reposted by Matt DurrantMichael Baym @baym.lol · 23/11/2024We've long been able to find new phages and figure out what they interact with. But what about the other direction: if you have a gene, like an antibiotic resistance efflux pump, or a phage defense system, and you want to find phages that do or do not interact with it? Now you can! 48335
Reposted by Matt DurrantEric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 14/11/2024New at Science Evo, a large language of life (LLLM) genomic foundation model, predicting & generating tasks from molecular to genomic scale science.org/doi/10.1126/... 320740
Reposted by Matt DurrantKevin K. Yang 楊凱筌 @kevinkaichuang.bsky.social · 14/11/2024Evo: A genomic language model of prokaryote genomes generates functional cas9 proteins and transposons. @brianhiestand.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 05927
Reposted by Matt DurrantHani Goodarzi @genophoria.bsky.social · 14/11/2024Really cool model from Brian Hie and Patrick Hsu! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 0188
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 14/11/2024Thrilled to see this published! Lots of progress since our preprint, including experimental validation of Evo-generated Cas9 and IS200/IS605 transposases. I am definitely a true believer when it comes to DNA language models, they have quickly become central to my discovery efforts. bit.ly/3OsmUPrbit.lyContents | Science 386, 6723 052
Reposted by Matt DurrantKresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 09/10/2023This post is long but informative (even if mostly written before the newest paper): The 8 Fallacies of Assembly Theory hectorzenil.medium.com/test-8f0be54...hectorzenil.medium.comThe 8 Fallacies of Assembly TheoryIn response to the alleged misunderstandings evident in our exposure of the many serious issues undermining the foundations and methods of… 084
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 06/10/2023What are some unwritten rules in academia that would be helpful for new folks to know? One rule I learned the hard way was that you don't reach out to other PIs about collaborating without discussing it with your PI first. 000
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 04/10/2023Does anyone know where I could find some measure of brain drain per year for each country? 000
Reposted by Matt DurrantJonathan Pritchard @jkpritch.bsky.social · 01/10/2023I'm delighted to release the first half of my new textbook in human genetics: web.stanford.edu/group/pritch... "An Owner's Guide to the Human Genome: an introduction to human population genetics, variation and disease"web.stanford.eduAn Owner's Guide to the Human GenomeAn Owner's Guide to the Human Genome 8296175
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 02/10/2023Photo taken out of our car window driving down big cottonwood canyon yesterday! #Utah 000
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 28/09/2023Such a cool paper! Congratulations to the authors. It’s a very exciting time to be studying mobile genetic elements, in terms of both fundamental biology and translational potential. www.nature.com/articles/s41...nature.comTransposon-encoded nucleases use guide RNAs to promote their selfish spread - NatureTnpB and IscB nucleases use transposon-encoded guide RNAs to target genomic sequences for cleavage, thereby favouring copying and spreading of transposable elements. 033
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 28/09/2023Such a cool paper! Great job @shsternberg and team. It’s a very exciting time to be studying mobile genetic elements, in terms of both fundamental biology and translational potential. www.nature.com/articles/s41...nature.comTransposon-encoded nucleases use guide RNAs to promote their selfish spread - NatureTnpB and IscB nucleases use transposon-encoded guide RNAs to target genomic sequences for cleavage, thereby favouring copying and spreading of transposable elements. 000
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2023In your experience, how long does it typically take for an editor to finally send out a paper for review? 000
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 25/09/2023So are AI-generated proteins not patentable? www.wired.com/story/ai-art...wired.comWhy This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be CopyrightedMatthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.” 000
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 23/09/2023Unpopular opinion: Oppenheimer wasn't a very good movie. 010
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 22/09/2023www.chemistryworld.com/news/pioneer...chemistryworld.comPioneers in synthetic biology and next-generation DNA sequencing ...Data science divinations and community chatter pick favourites for chemistry's top prize 000
Reposted by Matt DurrantJonathan Pritchard @jkpritch.bsky.social · 11/09/2023In terms of impact it clearly should...but my guess is that it won't, partly because it's hard to choose who should get it and also perhaps a bias against technology. And the Nobel's view of science via brilliant jumps is so outdated that it's often forced to choose smaller discrete contributions 011
Matt Durrant @mgdurrant.bsky.social · 10/09/2023Will next-generation sequencing receive a Nobel prize, and if it does who will it be awarded to? 140