The Wilkinson Lab is open for science! @mskcancercenter.bsky.social 🧬We'll be finding funky new RNA biology, mainly by looking at reverse transcriptases (i.e. the Best Enzymes In The World)🧬 annnd: I'm hiring - come join! Especially postdocs and PhD students - please get in touch (NYC is great)

a highly attractive hypothesis for the origin of telomerase, but imo more evidence is needed to rule out convergent evolution 1- other RT phylogenies place TERT within eukaryotic retroelement clades 2- template jumping could plausibly evolve into repeat synthesis activity multiple independent times

Public access to the first fly connectome that spans the whole CNS - BANC!: codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc Different from prior connectomes - it is brain + cord (think spinal cord) We use it to ‘embody’ the system and find it resembles ‘subsumption architecture’ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

If you like transposons... If you you love genome editing... Or if you just like random bird animations, we have the paper for you! We (@kedmonds.bsky.social et al) are happy to share our work turning a songbird retrotransposon into a genome editing tool. 🐣 (1/n)

Nice visit to the lovely Princeton campus. Could not be prouder of @automnenine.bsky.social. For those who are looking for a postdoc, there are exciting opportunities to join his lab!

Ridiculously good work by George on LINE-1 retrotransposition! Also the paper is an inspiring read - there's some really super biochem in it

we recently found some really neat RNA-guided DNA-cutting systems in phages. Despite remarkable similarities to CRISPR systems, including encoding guide RNAs in arrays, they appear entirely evolutionarily distinct (but definitely related to snoRNAs 🤓) We decided to call them TIGR-Tas systems 🐯

please go check out this glowing pink blob and what it does to the shiny gold blob (it's a spliceosome! Truly it was a nostalgic pleasure to help out with this paper, a super fun collaboration with @uwmadisonrna.bsky.social & Kathy and Karli)

gonna start shamelessly crossposting some of my molecular movies from the Other Place. Starting with my favourite: showing how wacky reverse transcription can defeat viruses. Bonus: some noises 🎹🎻

Our fly brain connectome papers are now live (www.nature.com/immersive/d4...), and is getting traction (www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...). With ~139k neurons, >8k cell types, synapses annotated, transmitters predicted, ~134 evo-devo units denoted, so much is now possible in the fly.