Ian Boys
@_iboys
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NIGMS K99 fellow (formerly LSRF) w/ @ElEarlyBird. Interests include viral evolution, comparative immunology, exploring the outdoors, and cooking.
Joined March 2018
A bit under two years ago, @ElEarlyBird & I jumped on the #AlphaFold2 bandwagon. Could ab initio modeling guide studies of host-virus interactions in poxviruses? For the deep dive, see our @CellReports article https://t.co/WmLBlhzNno. For some highlights, continue below!
cell.com
Viral homologs of host proteins can diverge beyond recognition by sequence comparison. Boys et al. use AlphaFold-based structural comparisons to identify homology between virus and host proteins....
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I’m thrilled to share a @biorxivpreprint for my postdoc work in the @PerrimonLab🎉. Together with our collaborators, we built a tissue-specific atlas of circulating secreted proteins in Drosophila 🧬🪰🧪🗺️. Thread below🧵 1/8 https://t.co/oRvsdpogof
biorxiv.org
Secreted proteins regulate many aspects of animal biology and are attractive targets for biomarkers and therapeutics. However, comprehensively identifying the “secretome”, along with their tissues of...
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I'd love to be in a timeline where an AI wouldn't cold-email you having "read" your recent preprint and come up with an "exciting Novel Hypothesis" to improve your work that is, shocker, largely behind a company's paywall. This isn't what we should be using ML for, dammit.
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Does anyone have a sense for how long it takes for an unannotated eukaryotic genome to process w/ NCBI following submission? The official "at least two weeks" is pretty vague & we're closing in on a month and a half. Also it's 2025 so I guess past experience may be irrelevant.
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Nearly a thousand fewer doctors applied to residency programs in Utah this year. Researchers noticed a pattern among the states experiencing the most severe losses in applicants: They had adopted restrictive abortion policies. https://t.co/4y8hEtbxQ3
sltrib.com
The number of new medical school graduates applying to Utah residency programs dropped by nearly a thousand this year, continuing a trend of health care professionals choosing to work elsewhere — a...
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"gekko cells are extremely sticky" ranks pretty high on my dumb little internal list of things I find funny, right next to "for frog cells, take culture media and dilute it with a ton of water"
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#PreprintAlert🚨Please share. Our latest #Ichthyosporean #EvoDevo story, led by M. Olivetta @ChandniBhickta @NChiaruttini & in co. with @burnsajohn. **𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗡𝗢𝗧 𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗹 #𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗿𝘆𝗼** LINK ➡️ https://t.co/zdiu7zlfPy Buckle up for a LONG 🧵(sorry)
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Follow-up: I ended up borrowing someone's computer to do this using Geneious. I try to avoid expensive software (especially subscriptions!) when community alternatives exist, but man did it make this easy.
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Does anyone have tool recommendations for sgRNA design using an in-house (nonmodel) assembled genome as a reference for specificity? Seems like there are several options, wondering if anyone could vouch for specific ones. Thanks!
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I'm late to the party retweeting this, but I highly, highly recommend taking a look at the Hilbert lab if you're interested in evolution and fungal pathogens. Zoë is an amazing scientist and will be a fantastic mentor for you if this is up your alley!
Opening day of the Hilbert Lab @BiologyBC @BostonCollege --can't wait to see what awesome science we get up to in this space in the years to come! Looking for anyone with a passion for evolution, fungal pathogens, and curiosity-driven science to come join us!
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A section of a paper in a reputable journal is dedicated to “identifying” something you published two years ago and fails to cite your work/the body of work yours itself was built upon...
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A little late to the party. Please apply for our newly posted faculty position in Evolutionary Genetics - broadly defined- here in the Department of Human Genetics at Utah @UofUHealth. PS: the photo below was taken 15 minutes from your new lab. https://t.co/BE20HTR7Wr
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We used a somewhat cobbled-together a pipeline to perform our homology searches. Now I’d suggest anyone interested in detecting cryptic homology take a look at Foldseek https://t.co/48Bk15fyxH by the @thesteinegger group. It’s an exciting time to be an evolutionary biologist!
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A second protein, C1, is a unique pyrin-Bcl2 fusion protein that paradoxically drives inflammasome & caspase activation. Whether this reduces viral fitness, or perhaps whether it represents a means by which poxviruses fine-tune inflammation to their benefit is an open question.
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Our screens led us to characterize two poxvirus proteins that influence inflammasome activity. A47, a virus-encoded gasdermin homolog, appears to have been repurposed by viruses to interfere with caspase activity, likely by mimicking one of their native substrates, gasdermins.
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The state of public transit funding in Utah. But hey, at least we get a gondola to help out the resorts! (Disclosure: I love the UTA, but imagine what they could do if, well, this wasn't part of what they had to do!)
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