Kevin Bennett

Postdoc. Genomics, hybridization, and sexual selection. Coloration. Birds.
@PennStateBio

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

Tomorrow will be a good day for birding.

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@evornithology Ooh nice. Can't wait to hear about it.

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@evornithology Yep. 👍

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@TheBirdist This would be by far the best birding in DC. There's no good habitat anywhere around the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia! The biggest tragedy of DC birding.

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@TheBirdist Even the normal Eastern birds are easier to get in south Texas.

[Diana Aguilar-Gómez @dianaguilr]

Today our paper is in the cover of @CurrentBiology and on the same issue there is a dispatch about our work!

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

A great summary of our recent warbler hybridization work in PLOS Bio.

[Jente Ottenburghs | Avian Hybrids 🦆🧬 @Jente_O]

New story on the Avian Hybrids blog!

A colorful mess: Widespread exchange of pigmentation genes across the Parulidae phylogeny
https://t.co/go6QI8tSvD

Based on the PLoS Biology paper by Kevin Bennett and his colleagues | #ornithology

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@evornithology 🤡

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@evornithology The dream

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@evornithology Scaup (both? hard to tell), LTDU, maybe some of the LTDUs in the back are actually BUFFs, COGO, WWSC, REDH, COME

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@mattyglesias "Substantially" actually meaning "several major mitochondrial haplogroups." Not the same thing.

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@capitalweather Shoveled and salted at 7am and 4pm, salted at 9pm. Cleared some slush this morning. Totally clear today.

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@mattyglesias Consider de-paywalling this so your critics who won't want to subscribe can read the whole thing and respond. Will probably net you more subscribers.

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@bendreyfuss I've lived in Bethesda, Petworth, College Park, Alexandria, now way out in Woodbridge. Always tomatillos in the stores. Where are you shopping for tomatillos?

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@bendreyfuss This is the way to go. Cheap Logitech Mouse has revolutionized my working from coffeeshops.

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@evornithology Velvet asity got lost on the way to the manakin party.

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

No big deal, just...

[Patrick Hsu @pdhsu]

Today in @ScienceMagazine, we report a new DNA editing technology to seamlessly write massive changes into the right place in the human genome.

The reason gene editing hasn't transformed human health is that current gene editing technologies like CRISPR are very limited.

The problem with CRISPR is that it cuts up your DNA, and then hopes that unreliable cellular DNA repair will make the wanted edit. @geochurch famously called it genome vandalism. More precise versions of CRISPR only edit less than 100 bases - often only a single base. Therefore, it's not suited to make large changes safely.

However, most diseases are not the result of mutations in one location. Instead, their causes are spread all across the 3 billion base pairs in the genome.

We found bridge RNAs in bacterial “jumping genes” that allow us to make safe and arbitrary changes (insert, cut out, or flip) to every nucleotide within (up to) a 1 million bp sequence in your DNA.

In the paper, we show that we can correct the disease-causing DNA repeats that cause Friedreich's ataxia (which is a rare neurological disease). The same approach could be applied to Huntington’s and other repeat expansion disorders.
At @arcinstitute, we're working towards a full Turing machine for biology. Evo, our DNA foundation model, helps us design the optimal healthy DNA sequences. And Bridge recombination gives us the ability to seamlessly write these changes into the right place in the genome.
This work was a wonderful collaboration with my @arcinstitute cofounder @SKonermann and led by the indefatigable @ntperry13, alongside our amazing bridge editing team: @BartieLiam @dhruvakatrekar @Gabogonzalez515 @mgdurrant @james_jw_pai @AlisonFanton Juliana Martins Masa Hiraizumi @chiaroscurale @hnisimasu

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@evornithology Monday night football

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@TheBirdist Has to be fruitcrow

[Kevin Bennett @KevinFPBennett]

@TheBirdist Digging in and building on all the work I've done thus far to learn the birds in G. Have to stick with it.