Our work on opto- and chemogenetic control of broad-spectrum anti-CRISPR proteins is now out in Nucleic Acids Research: academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Our work on rationally engineering allosteric protein switches is now out in Nature Methods: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thanks a lot to @grunewald.bsky.social and @noahholzleitner.bsky.social for the comprehensive news and views: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out the new pre-print from our lab on phage-assisted evolution of light-switchable, allosteric proteins. Congrats to first author @neuroscinikolai.bsky.social, co-corresponding author @jmathony.bsky.social and everyone from the @niopeklab.bsky.social involved! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper alert! We introduce the modular allosteric thermo-control of protein activity. Employing the AsLOV2 domain and mutants thereof as thermoreceptors, we engineered diverse hybrid proteins, whose activity can be controlled by small temperature changes (37-40/41 °C). doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We have an exciting new PhD opportunity! If you are fsacinated by proteins and their dynamics and want to engineer them to develop new molecular tools: apply now! We are a young and dynamic team combining state-of-the-art laboratory and bioinformatics approaches. Please share.

Many thanks to @jmathony.bsky.social for presenting his intriguing research on allosteric protein switches, and how to design them using ML-based prediction of insertion sites for domains like the photoreceptor LOV2. And thank you to @bocklab.bsky.social for hosting this impromptu seminar at #CeMM!👏

I'd like to share a little bit of happy lab news in these chaotic times: a new preprint, driven by the brilliant Qinhao Cao! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We address a big challenge in synbio: If you give me a protein "X", how can I give you a version of X whose activity is controlled by a kinase?

"Humanity's Last Exam" (formerly "Humanity's Last Stand") Front page NYT today, by @kevinroose.com Gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/t...

Every once in a while we publish a paper that moves a whole field forward. I think that's the case for this one from the Bugaj lab, where they describe proteins for THERMOGENETIC control of cellular behavior. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper on computational design of chemically induced protein interactions is out in @natureportfolio.bsky.social. Big thanks to all co-authors, especially Anthony Marchand, Stephen Buckley and Bruno Correia! t.co/vtYlhi8aQm

We have an open professorship in #synbio / biological engineering in Heidelberg! jobs.zeit.de/jobs/full-pr... Check it out!

Protein language models excel at generating functional yet remarkably diverse artificial sequences. They however fail to naturally sample rare datapoints, like very high activities. In our new preprint, we show that RL can solve this without the need for additional data: arxiv.org/abs/2412.12979

Excited to announce our optogenetic transcriptional deactivation toolbox is now out in its final form at Nucleic Acids research: academic.oup.com/nar/advance-....

We trained a model to co-generate protein sequence and structure by working in the ESMFold latent space, which encodes both. PLAID only requires sequences for training but generates all-atom structures! Really proud of @amyxlu.bsky.social 's effort leading this project end-to-end!

Very excited about the first preprint from our lab at TUM! This is a fun gene & cell therapy collaboration led by @schmidts.bsky.social's lab. We use generative #AI to design new #CARTcell therapies. Check out Andrea's thread & thanks to the whole team! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New pre-print from our group reporting engineered, broad-spectrum anti-CRISPR proteins based on AcrIIA5, a type II inhibitor, and AcrVA1, a type V inhibitor, for opto- and chemogenetic control of CRISPR-Cas9 and -Cas12a: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/3)

Now out in Nucleic Acids Research: A deep mutational scanning platform to characterize the fitness landscape of anti-CRISPR proteins: doi.org/10.1093/nar/... (1/4)