Katy Brown

Katy Brown

@thekatybrown.bsky.social

Postdoc in computational genomics studying RNA viruses at Cambridge. She/Her https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8400-6922

1,516 Followers 2,980 Following 74 Posts Joined Dec 2023
1 month ago
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I cherish this mug so much that I don't even use it for liquids..
And it's from the 1993 my beloved paper by Dolja and Koonin. I will forever be grateful for @thekatybrown.bsky.social for such a thoughtful gift! :)

Their work was also what got me into virology without any hesitation:)

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1 month ago
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🧬 Data scientists and enablers with experience in UK biomedical research: Your experience matters! MRC-funded research to tackle isolation & career barriers in biomedical data science roles.

app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/bio...
πŸ“… Closes: 6/3/26
Β£50 Prize draw
Contact: integrate@imm.ox.ac.uk

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1 month ago
Expression of Retroviruses in Guinea Pig Lymphomas Retroviruses commonly cause neoplasia in many species but have not been described in guinea pigs. While historical evidence exists for the presence of an active retrovirus in domestic guinea pigs ( Cavia porcella), there has been no description of the sequence of these viruses or their role in disease in guinea pigs. This paper uses genome mining of the published domestic and wild ( Cavia aperea) guinea pig genomes for retroviral sequences to identify the gamma and beta-retroviral complement of the Cavia genome, describing eight groups of viruses with evidence of recombination between virus groups. The most intact group, gamma-like retroviruses related to HERV-T (integration estimates of 855,000 to 3.8 million years ago), has five near full length loci that are likely capable of active infection. RNA-Scope In-situ Hybridisation of archived formalin-fixed, paraffin embedded (FFPE) guinea pig lymphoma sections with a probe for one of these loci demonstrated viral RNA expression in lymphoma tissue, strengthening the case for a role of these viruses in the high incidence of leukaemia and lymphoma in this species. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. University of Nottingham, https://ror.org/01ee9ar58

I have a new preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... I found this endogenous retrovirus as a PhD student with @rtarlinton.bsky.social back in 2012 - a mere 14 years later we've written it up! This ERV is expressed in guinea pig lymphomas and might explain their high rate of lymphoma/leukemia. πŸ’»πŸ§ͺ

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2 months ago

It would be interesting to look! But it’s hard to find them.

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2 months ago

Perfect summary!

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2 months ago

also the post at the ToL slack was captioned

barger badger badger badger
virus virus
AAAAAAAHHH sponge sponge it's a sponge

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2 months ago

Thank you! This is amazing!

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2 months ago
comic doodle of a speaker in greys blacks and whites, with a red orange background, the topics include RNA viruses, a badger, and a sponge with viral spots.

really nice talk by @thekatybrown.bsky.social on fishing for viruses in our Darwin Tree of Life @sangerinstitute.bsky.social datasets 🎣🦠

#SciArt #sketchnote

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3 months ago

Proud to have been a part of this! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

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4 months ago

#bioinformatics #rnavirus #virology

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4 months ago

+ all kinds of EVEs in arthropods! I also found a bunch of viral pathogens mislabelled as bacterial and explored "near miss" proteins - with probably coincidental similarity to RdRp. 5/5

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4 months ago

I love EVEs so I spent time exploring and found orbivirus like EVEs in nematodes which pre-date species divergence and with a likely infectious counterpart, loads of diverse mitovirus-like regions in plants, and the first EVEs in the Perkinozoa phylum of protists 4/5

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4 months ago

Initially I wanted to explore how complicated it is to use database proteins as a negative control when looking for viruses because so many are unlabelled viral sequences. But then I unexpectedly found hundreds of RdRp-like endogenous viral elements 3/5

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4 months ago

I dug into proteins labelled as e.g. "unchacterised protein", "hypothetical protein" without any named function from any species in the NCBI protein and UniProt databases to find proteins related to RdRp 2/5

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4 months ago
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My paper is out! Uncovering hundreds of exogenous and endogenous RNA viral RdRp sequences amongst uncharacterised sequences in public protein databases. doi.org/10.1093/ve/v... πŸ’»πŸ§¬ 1/5 🧡

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5 months ago
Title screen for "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway". Screenshot from "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway". In front of a green room that seems to be built out of giant circuit board pieces, there are close-up pictures of Jeff Jet and an NPC wearing glasses and a red sweater. A line of dialog is visible between them: "Good day to you!". Screenshot from "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway". The two main characters, Jeff and Donna, are standing near a road tunnel with a closed barrier gate in front of it and a guard standing by. There is a large truck loaded with gigantic ones and zeroes. The mouse cursor is hovering over these ones and zeroes, and the word "Bits" appears next to it. Screenshot from "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway". One of the main characters, Donna, stands in the middle of a large desert tent with visible patches and holes. A small office area has been set up behind her, with a woman sitting at a desk with a computer on it. There is an empty chair with a green coat lying on it in the foreground facing the desk. At the bottom of the screen, there is a row of inventory items. The mouse cursor is over one of them, a red and green magnet, with the word "Magnet" shown next to it.

I translated "Jeff Jet: Abenteuer InfoHighway" as "Jeff Jet: Adventure on the InfoHighway" archive.org/details/jeff... - a German promotional adventure game for Hewlett Packard from 1995.

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7 months ago

Come to the BOKR session at 2:20 and see Charlotte Tumescheit @schnamo.bsky.social give a super interesting talk about improving prediction of molecular properties by incorporating ontologies. #ISMBECCB2025

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7 months ago

Someone needs to implement an LLM to help select which talks to go to at #ISMBECCB2025

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7 months ago
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Come and see me in the ice rink if you want to plot phylogenies in matplotlib! Poster 206. GitHub.com/KatyBrown/plot_phylo #ISMBECCB2025

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7 months ago

You ring the doorbell on Oncology, just show any card, they won't check, then go down two floors in the lift, around the corner and then up one floor, once you get outside climb over the fence, scrabble up the verge, sign in as a visitor and you're there.

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7 months ago

It's the same in the UK. They specialise in roads which look like they link together but there's a huge fence or mysterious ditch blocking the way, or they've joined two buildings across the gap but not added a door to let people through.

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7 months ago
ISMBECCB_2025_All_Detailed_Schedule.csv

I reformatted the #ISMBECCB2025 schedule a bit - in case anyone else wants to use it this way - ordered by day and start time:

csv: drive.google.com/file/d/1JyhT...

xlsx:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

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7 months ago

Thank you! This is amazing.

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7 months ago
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Excited for the ISMB/ECCB conference! I have two posters A520 today about an endogenous and exogenous virus I found in nematodes - and B206 tomorrow about my tool plot_phylo for drawing phylogenies in matplotlib. #ISMBECCB2025

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8 months ago

And the same colour!

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8 months ago

Is it so much to ask for all my bullet points to be 1. the same size and 2. in a straight line?

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8 months ago

I could do my job in half the time if we just picked a column delimiter and stuck with it and then no-one can use that symbol for anything else. Let's not use * to both delimit columns and represent a stop codon, or use a random number of spaces, or put "_" in our sequence IDs. πŸ–₯️πŸ§ͺ

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8 months ago
Too poor to science: How wealth determines who succeeds in STEM From student to researcher, a career in science can come with a high price tag. This Perspective explores how persistent financial barriers limit who can succeed in science, revealing how wealth shape...

From student to researcher, a #career in #science can come with a high price tag. @drcraigmc.bsky.social explores how wealth shapes opportunity in #STEM and proposes structural changes to support #equity and inclusion. πŸ§ͺ
plos.io/4edGlY4

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8 months ago

There should be a ban on broadcasters using footage of β€œanonymous” (heads cropped out) larger people - who could nevertheless recognise themselves based on knowing their own bodies and clothes - to illustrate stories about obesity, fat or weight loss

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8 months ago

Are you interested in using AI to decode RNA? Have a look at this brilliant new review from my friend @schnamo.bsky.social and her colleagues.

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