SEED 2026 Abstract due in 3 days! We've got an excellent line up of keynotes & invited speakers. Join us to present your work & hear the latest SynBio breakthroughs. A major theme this year is AI+Bio! 🧬🔬🤖💻🦠 synbioconference.org/2026
Excited to share our latest preprint on work led by postdoc Robert Lusi (@rflusi.bsky.social)! Introducing ALTER (AGO-Led Targeted Editing of RNA) for non-downregulatory RNA manipulation by repurposing hAGO2, non-immunogenic and capitalizing on evolution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
So you think your mammalian plasmids have nothing to fear from cloning and propagation in E.coli?
Quantitative profiling of millions of nucleotides by Tom Copeman will prove you wrong! Supervised with the amazing @proftomellis.bsky.social and AZ, now on BioRxiv:
doi.org/10.64898/202...
New in ACS SynBio: led by Dennis Bolshakov, we used the awesome power of yeast to define how expression levels, noise, and sequence program the dynamics of synthetic protein waves, allowing us to genetically encode new cellular timescales stable over generations!
pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....
If anyone wants to kill a few minutes during their (pre-)Thanksgiving travel: gaolab.blog/2025/11/12/i...
Have you ever wondered what it would've been like to live in a different kind of society? After a record number of rejections, I'm self-archiving my first attempt at... flash fiction, featuring "Hemingway-esque economy" and "Ishiguro's measured revelation" (if you ask Claude).
Whether you think limiting student visas to 4 years is a good or bad thing, please comment. Be heard.
With 2 postdocs moving on to faculty positions🥳, we're looking to hire someone new. If you're interested in norepinephrine and neural circuits, please apply! tinyurl.com/42bfe24k
Image credit: DALL-E. Not long ago I wouldn't have imagined my lab making our own nanobodies, the same way that I wouldn't have imagined myself making any image worth posting. Grateful to stand on the shoulders of so many protein designers.
t.co/UmbCz8ajMD Spearheaded by Santi, it’s a tremendous team effort with John, Claudia, Haoyu, Talal, and Xiaowei, and a close collaboration between @brianhie.bsky.social’s and my labs. Can’t wait to see what binders everyone will design with it!
Having often dealt with the frustration of binder-limited projects, we sought a more accessible source for nanobodies than yeast display or llama. Here we introduce Germinal, computationally designing antibody-like binders with such a hit rate that only tens need to be screened for each target.
doi.org/10.1101/2025... Led by
Nat Kolber with key contributions from
Eerik Kaseniit. We also worked with
@tobiaslanz.bsky.social and Bill Robinson from an Epstein–Barr virus angle.
We previously built programmable RNA sensors based on editing by housekeeping ADAR enzymes. But they can't sense arbitrary sequences due to design constraints (analogous to PAM for CRISPR). With our new "modulADAR", we overcome that constraint by leveraging ADAR's modularity.
Excited to share our latest: we engineered the reactivity of a bacterial E1-like enzyme for ATP-driven modification of C termini. Our tool mimics the logic of peptide bond formation in biology for precision modification of proteins in vitro. 🧪https://rdcu.be/ewN7C
In collaboration with Wing Wong's lab, co-led by Sophia Lu & @Xiaowei0402 (don't miss their respective posters at ICML GenBio Workshop and Protein Engineering GRC), with key contributions from @santimillef & Haoyu Dai.
Have you always wanted to take a protein from its native context and make it work elsewhere? Our novel sampler computationally “cytosolize” a secreted enzyme while maintaining its structure, generalizable to other multi-objective guided generation tasks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The machine-guided humanization paper is out after peer review! doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... Key contributions from current and previous international students on visas, representing 5+ countries.
Our latest work developing AND-gate probes for imaging caspase-1 mediated inflammation is out. Very productive collaboration with Merck & Co. in South San Francisco. #chembio. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Flyer for the 2025 Next Generation Faculty Symposium (including QR code in top right corner). This symposium highlights the work of exceptional early-career scientists in the broad field of quantitative biological and biomedical sciences, with a track record of excellence in research, leadership, mentorship, and community engagement. These early career scientists are preparing to launch a faculty search. Applications are due May 30th, 2025.
Hello Community!
Are you a postdoc/grad student preparing to launch a faculty search? Do you have a track record of excellence in research, leadership, mentorship & community engagement? Apply to the 2025 Next Generation Faculty Symposium: www.berkeleystanfordnextgensymposium.com! Pls repost! (1/3)
Thank you, Scott! We certainly hope we could go that far...
Thank you, Sai!
More importantly, for diseases that have to be addressed using nucleic acid therapies, such as some recalcitrant cancers, RNA offers the safer option than the more conventional DNA vectors, because RNA is less likely to leave permanent marks in the patients' cells.
If I might clumsily point out the economic impact: our project germinated from Impetus Grants @norngroup.bsky.social and an NIH trailblazer grant that add up to ~$0.5M, and now our company supports a dozen employees.
Grateful for the recognition and for my team's dedication. When I wrote it in Oct, I didn't anticipate that the title would feel defiant. The original draft even had a now quaint reference to "the comparative comfort of the ivory tower", which was wisely removed.
Thank you, Daryl. Hope all is well!
LIDAR is out! rdcu.be/efugD We are one baby step closer to making it useful for therapeutics. NIH high-risk high-reward program provides key support.
If you have time in your life to read only one of @jeremymberg.bsky.social’s bluetorials, please read this one
We were inspired by pioneering humanization works from Roybal and @chembiobryan.bsky.social labs. We especially stood on the shoulders of @mokhalil.bsky.social lab's synZiFTRs.
As is typical of such works, we built on what came before us, esp. the ZF programming model developed by @hsnajafabadi.bsky.social et al, and the protein language model-guided optimization demonstrated by @brianhie.bsky.social et al and others.
Led by Eric, with key contributions from JS, and featuring MHC presentation prediction from Binbin in Alizadeh lab and humanized transcription activation domain from Josh in Bintu and Bassik labs. None of it would've been possible without the support of NIH and private foundations.
