Today in @nature.com , we highlight how a cousin of CRISPR-Cas10, mCpol, establishes an evolutionary trap in anti-phage immune systems. Check out @erinedoherty.bsky.social and my work from @doudna-lab.bsky.social lab here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very excited to share new work out today in @natchembio.nature.com on a new approach - FACES - for selectively imaging of phospholipids and other biomolecules at spatial resolutions down to individual membrane leaflets (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New Paper Alert! “The diversity of PET-degrading enzymes: A review”. We present a database of PET-plastic hydrolases, including sequence, structure, and function. From this, we discuss the distribution, efficiency, stability, and potential for biodegradation of PETases.

I am thrilled to announce that I just opened my lab at New York University in @nyucns.bsky.social and Biology! Our work will explore the richness of animal behavior, dissecting the genetic and circuit mechanisms that shape its evolution.

We are hiring! The #PlantBio department at UIUC is looking to recruit an Assistant Professor in Plant-Fungal interactions. Application deadline is October 31st @dallingjim.bsky.social see the link below for more details: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Applications are invited for our Independent Research Fellowship scheme to support early career scientists in establishing their own research groups. The deadline is 24 October 2025 and further details of how to apply are here: www.bioc.cam.ac.uk/research/ind...

Professor Susanne von Caemmerer FRS and Professor Graham Douglas Farquhar FRS are jointly awarded the Royal Medal (Biological) 2025 for refining the ways we monitor and model photosynthesis in leaves from molecular to global scales. #RSMedals https://royalsociety.org/medals-and-prizes/royal-medals/

Excited to share our new preprint co-led by @jnoms.bsky.social! Here we reveal an exceptional diversity of viral 2H phosphodiesterases (PDEs) that enable immune evasion by selectively degrading oligonucleotide-based messengers. This 2H PDE fold has evolved striking substrate breath & specificity.

!!! Yes!

I love this diagram

The first paper from my PhD is out now! doi.org/10.1111/jeu.... We describe a new photosynthetic #Paulinella species from a brackish beach in British Columbia 🇨🇦 Big thanks to the co-authors Maia Palka and @alive-in-the-ocean.bsky.social, and my supervisor @fburki.bsky.social #protistsonsky

You can't let those macroeconomic headwinds tell you how to live your life

🚨 We’re hiring! The Burlacot Lab @carnegiescience.bsky.social is recruiting a Postdoc to study how photosynthetic electron flows power CO₂ fixation in algae 🌱🧫 Cutting-edge microscopy + biophysics + sustainability 🚀 Apply: apply.interfolio.com/171656

Our lab at Yale @yalemedicine.bsky.social seeks #postdocs with in vivo expertise to pioneer research at the intersection of tissue remodeling & aging. Work with us to uncover immunological & vascular drivers of ovarian aging, applying single-cell, spatial omics, and ML! jobrxiv.org/job/yale-uni...

Congrats to our savage lab undergrads on their research and presentations in our inaugural undergrad research symposium 🎉🥳

Honored to be among this amazing group and be recognized for the early career research award in memory of Günter Blobel

New from our lab in @narjournal.bsky.social: We dissect the folding dynamics of a fundamental element of RNA secondary structure—a stem-loop—at single-molecule and microsecond resolution. doi.org/10.1093/nar/... 1/5

Untangling phage immunity systems can be really challenging but @owentuck.bsky.social and team used phylogeny and biochemistry beautifully to show how a pair of genes got repurposed as a component in multiple defence systems.

Escherichia coli selection strains for growth-coupled metabolic engineering @cp-trendsbiotech.bsky.social Review by @helenasm.bsky.social, @beaubd.bsky.social, and Tobias Erb at @mpimicrobiomarburg.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/biote...

Nice work showing it is possible to engineer increased oxygen tolerance of fast rubiscos using in vivo directed evolution via @pnas.org doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

SynBio: it’s what plants crave doi.org/10.1093/jxb/... J Exp Bot Insights article from *Dan Hong Loh* - she discusses the impacts of Rubisco SynBio tool expansions from Archer et al. 2025 (doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...).

Muqarnas are the "Oops, only spandrels" of cathedral ceilings. #gould #levontin #sanmarco #Pangloss #adaptationist #evolution #mosques #architecture #pendentive #squinch #persia #capncrunch #iwan #mihrab #corbel #stalactite #honeycomb en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqarna...

Exciting new work from Sattely lab with collaborator @pollyfordyce.bsky.social and coworkers @stanford-chemh.bsky.social, solving they biosynthesis of taxol! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

This alphabet has 20 letters, and therefore integrates well with existing tree inference software (to which a 3di alignment looks like a regular old protein alignment). This means we can use this to infer trees.

6/10 dCas12f-Sigma factors are able to recruit their native RNA polymerase (RNAP) to drive RNA-guided transcription at programmable sites. Remarkably, we were able to generate RNA (see RNA-seq) without relying on promoters in intergenic sequences, even within genes, and on either DNA strand.

Check out our pre-print on ProteinGuide, a new method for conditioning protein generative models on experimental data! Thanks to the amazing team: @junhaobearxiong.bsky.social, @hnisonoff.bsky.social, Ishan, Luke, @jlistgarten.bsky.social and @davesavage.bsky.social! @savagecatsonly.bsky.social

Carbon-Efficient Conversion through Hydrogen and Formate-Driven Metabolism in Escherichia coli https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.30.657096v1

A blast from the past! The Gonzalez Group, circa 2008, celebrating our first publication! Check out much, much younger versions of, from left to right, Pallav Kosuri, yours truly, Sam Sternberg, Mike Englander, @jingyifei.bsky.social, Daniel MacDougall, Margaret Elvekrog, and Subasree Das!

A novel CCM? Interesting! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The W-S lab is seeking to hire a research scientist! This person will lead wet-lab innovations in our team as we combine AI and experiments to understand and design dynamics! Thanks for sharing/RTs! jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/scienti...

Chemists Stuart Schreiber of Harvard University and Arena BioWorks and Peter Schultz of @scripps.edu will split the 2025 Welch Award in Chemistry for their work in the field of chemical biology. cen.acs.org/people/award... #chemsky🧪

Flowers unfold with surprising precision, despite unruly genes news.cornell.edu/stories/2025... Nice article in the Cornell Chronicle about our @natcomms.nature.com article rdcu.be/emNVQ @cornellcals.bsky.social

"..one of the biggest challenges right now for evoCAST, and other large DNA editing tools under development, is delivery. 'How do we actually get these tools and their payloads into the cells or tissues of interest?'” www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/sternbe...

An old video of a Nassula sp. (ciliate) cell swimming around in darkfield where you can get a sense of its 3-D structure, but I also feel like it just looks like a jellybean. #protistsonsky

More surprise in our little favorite algal model: Chlamydomonas 🧪🧬💚. Not bad for something with no bones and no brain 😉- Congratulations to all the authors, including @rorycraig.bsky.social, @brussaard7.bsky.social, @giantvirus.bsky.social & @foaylward.genomic.social.ap.brid.gy 🥳 - you rock!

Some personal news: today is my last day at Ginkgo Bioworks After 3 years telling people about the cool things they can build with biology, maybe it was inevitable that I would evangelize myself I’m starting a new project with an old friend that I hope to post more about soon

1/10 Today in @science.org in collaboration with the Liu group we report the development of a laboratory-evolved CRISPR-associated transposase (evoCAST) that supports therapeutically relevant levels of RNA-programmable gene insertion in human cells. drive.google.com/file/d/1I-Ub...

Atom level enzyme active site scaffolding using RFdiffusion2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.09.648075v1

Excited to share a main project from my PhD, out now in @naturecomms.bsky.social! 📝 We've designed and brought to life the “CORE cycle” – a new-to-nature pathway that provides a novel route for biological CO2 capture 🦠🌱 nature.com/articles/s41... Take a look! Thread below... 🧵

Chemically Synthesized Ultra-long DNA as Building Blocks to Accelerate Complex Gene Construction in Synthetic Biology https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.02.646740v1

Machine learning-assisted enzyme engineering through ultra-high throughput sorting and large-scale sequence-function data generation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.30.645636v1

2/ By introducing new 'building blocks' to protein synthesis, Awardee Ahmed Badran aims to discover new functions in a key enzyme in photosynthesis, RuBisCO. His work may be key to combatting 💪#climatechange 🌎. 🍾Congrats Dr. Badran! @scripps.edu 🙏#HFScout @krishnanyamuna.bsky.social

Preprint alert! ✨ In this project that I co-led with @benadler.bsky.social, we show that a miniature CRISPR-Cas10-like enzyme, mCpol, uses a novel inverse signaling mechanism to prevent the spread of viruses that attempt immune evasion by depleting host cyclic nucleotides. Check it out:

In eukaryotes, some transposons target telomeres; in Drosophila, they even replace them. Peters lab and Barabas group show that bacteria with linear genomes also harbor diverse telomeric transposons. doi.org/10.1126/scie... @joepeterslab.bsky.social

SO excited to share that a major part of the postdoctoral work in @robzonculab.bsky.social lab is now published: “Leucine aminopeptidase LyLAP enables lysosomal degradation of membrane proteins” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Last month, IGI scientists went to India to teach workshops on using #CRISPR to edit locally important crops including chickpea, rice + mustard. Thanks to the Indian Council of Agricultural Research for hosting us! Learn more: ow.ly/Z5lB50Vl5rr

On this day in 1879, Maud Menten was born in Port Lambton, Ontario. In her work as a medical researcher, she became a leading expert in histochemistry and enzyme kinetics while fighting against sexism in her field. Let's learn more about her life! 🧵1/10