Been working on a really strange retron bacterial immune system, here's the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Type VI retrons are unlike any other. Phage infection triggers reverse transcription of a DNA fragment that activates translation of a toxin to kill the infected cell.

Now published in PLOS Biology! We found new retron containing bacteria in the wild, figured out defense mechanisms, and turned them into genome editors. From a cupful of dirt to new parts for genome editing in one story! journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Check out MitoScribe in our new preprint led by Linhan Wang: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... It's an analog molecular recorder that uses neutral base edits to the mitochondrial genome to store information about historical signaling in a cell. Single cell resolution at scale (see next post)!

New Preprint!! Alejandro González-Delgado accomplished a major feat on this one: ported retron recombineering, which we love so much in E. coli, into 14 new bacterial species via a massive collaborative effort involving 9 labs! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We just posted a new preprint where we found retrons in bacteria out in the real world, in dirt and water. We describe the first retrons in a handful of new species, show how they defend against phages, and use them to edit genomes. Read about it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New Pub: High throughput variant libraries and machine learning yield design rules for retron gene editors, now out in Nucleic Acids Research. This is a great one, and the last bit of Kate Crawford's PhD, who is off to David Bakar's Lab for a postdoc. academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...