William Morton

New conference, new poster!

Rather than have everyone take pictures at EBSA 2025, you can see my poster here.

Many ongoing projects at the moment, and I tried to highlight each of them here. The one I'm most excited about is the Heterotypic IDR Affinity!

Imagine designing IDRs that can infiltrate specific condensates...

IDPSeminars is back this week (Tomorrow, March 6th)! Come hear about nucleolar organization and IDRs in host-pathogen interactions!

PST 10 am
EST 1 pm
CET 7 pm!

Info: idpseminars.com
Signup form: forms.gle/3yCHeYvuuqLh...

🚨 All right, since this is a place of sanity now, let’s kick things off with an open PhD position in my team to work on simulating glycans and their interactions. If you’re passionate about computational biophysics and glycobiology, go ahead and apply! Any shares would be greatly appreciated. 🙃

Today @gogs-k.bsky.social, @tlhr.bsky.social, and I are launching @bindresearch.org, a UK-based not-for-profit research startup to deliver publicly–available tools and datasets to make intrinsically disordered proteins druggable. 🍝 💊🧲 💻 🦠

Announcing the Biophysics Week IDP Trainee Symposium on March 27 at 12pm CT hosted by @idpseminars.bsky.social & The BPS IDP Subgroup! Join via Zoom for talks by talented grad students & postdocs. Abstract submissions are open! See flyer for more details! #BiophysicsWeek @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social

Special thanks to Marek Šebesta for answering countless questions, Robert Vácha for mentorship, @labvacha.bsky.social for support.
Discussions with Balázs Fábián, David DeSancho, and Guilio Tesei helped to greatly improve the quality of my work!

Mechanisms of transcription attenuation and condensation of RNA polymerase II by RECQ5 The elongation rates of RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) require precise control to prevent transcriptional stress, which can impede co-transcriptional pre-mRNA processing and contribute to many age- or dis...

Massive thanks to everyone at CEITEC for their collaboration, patience, and support!

There’s still work ahead, but this is a big step forward. 🚀

📜 Read the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
💻 Check out the code here: github.com/shakespearem...

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This project was a huge shift for me—moving from designing metal alloys as a materials engineer to simulating biological systems. It’s been a journey with many iterations, but taking this work to conferences throughout the year has helped refine both the research and the questions I ask.

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The Complex Version:
RECQ5 binds to RNA Polymerase II (RNAP) at the DNA entry site 👉👈. It forms its own condensates and can recruit RNAP when the C-Terminal Domain is hyper-phosphorylated. This suggests a complex network of interactions—one we explore in detail in our preprint. 🕸️

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🚨 New Preprint Alert! 🚨

🔬 Step inside a biomolecular condensate with us!

The Simple Version:
RECQ5 is like a traffic controller 🚗🚦—helping prevent ‘accidents’ during DNA transcription and reducing errors.

Excited to sign up and join the event!

Academic Skyers: I am compiling a list of policies and statements from various universities about how they are handling the "pause" in terms of stopping expenditures (or not).

Please respond to this post with your institution and materials.

THANK YOU!

An excellent lesson in collecting results from different disciplines into one shareable story!

Beautifully put together results.

It’s surprisingly hard to convince scientists to come to Brno. However, they definitely put in the effort to make foreigners feel welcome! Still my favorite academic job so far.

We’re off to a strong start in 2025. First, work of Láďa on enhanced diffusion received a beautiful cover.