Experimental Design

Moldy plate ✨

Weekend well spent learning Blender and Molecular Nodes by the great @bradyajohnston.bsky.social My first animation: "Interpretation of NRC2 resistosome assembly on the plasma membrane"

Pleased to share this thoughtful essay by Jess on my flower design project🌹🧬 As a small thank-you for spreading the work, I'm randomly giving away 5 of these new morphogenesis hoodies to whoever reposts this!

Giving away the next piece of the 1000 flower collection on Monday! Here’s a sneak peek:

Life evolves slowly through tiny mutations, but sometimes a single mutation creates something that feels like a glitch in the matrix. Here are four of nature’s most beautiful accidents 🧵

Did someone say fruit design? 🍌🧬 Stripey Arabidopsis siliques with RUBY sectors:

Fun fact, a lot of wonderful scientific illustrations you see in the 19th century natural science publications, were done by women, usually spouses of the researchers as uncredited free labour. The famous finches, came from John Gould, his wife, Elizabeth, illustrated his ornithology books.

The hidden danger of Biorender (& the death of scientific illustration) A short thread 🧵

My academic phase transitions. Emo botanist phase was a mood 😂

With the 50-year rise of Arabidopsis as the most studied plant, is it time for its downfall? Let’s investigate it’s history and outlook 🧵

After 10 Fridays, 10 flowers, and 100+ drawings, the Florédex is complete! ✨ Come take a tour of the design and science behind 10 iconic flowers 🌺🧵

"Technology always becomes obsolete, but a good aesthetic is, by definition, timeless" -Sheehan Quirke Preview of my flower design toolkit and its visual language.

By radiating plants, one begins to unlock new floral forms, enabling our understanding of the underlying patterns written in their DNA and developmental programs. Familiar forms re-emerge, and evolutionary routes towards recognisable systems reveal themselves 👇

Friday Flower 010: Rosa hybrida ✨ Roses come in a range of colors, often blending into beautiful gradients due to their anthocyanins. In 2004, Florigene created the world’s first “blue rose,” using delphinidin biosynthesis to achieve a hue long thought impossible.

Daily dose of micro-rose propaganda ✨

Biology requires some level of faith that what you’re doing is going to work. I keep these paper prototypes of the flowers I am making on my bench as a patient reminder. It will work.

Friday Flower 009: Nigella arvensis ✨ Nigella’s flowers form a morphologically complex display with ornate bracts and blue sepals. The true petals have diverse patterning with intricate, nectar-bearing structures that look alien.

Stepped into the “room of rare books” @JohnInnesCentre today and was blown away… Les roses by Redouté, Origin of species by Darwin, and a 1511 book on mythical beasts!

Last week I toured Neoplants, a biotech company engineering houseplants! 🧬🌱 Hidden just off the streets of Paris, their lab is the most beautiful biotech space I’ve ever seen.

🎃 Why are (Halloween) pumpkins orange – and not pink or blue? This secret is explored by @bpucker.bsky.social, @nancy-choudhary.bsky.social and Marie Hagedorn. Their research examines how carotenoids took over, making Jack O’Lanterns forever orange: www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/colo.... Happy Halloween!

@igemhq.bsky.social and SB8 was unforgettable. Would love to supervise a team on flower design for the new art/design village 🎨🌹🧬

Don’t miss my presentation @iGEM tomorrow at 14:00 main stage! I will be throwing out bio-designer shirts to the back row 🧬🤘

Thank you Rainer 🙏

Genetically engineered color-changing Arabidopsis 🧬📷- attempt #3 I think I finally nailed it with this one.

Friday Flower 008: Tulip 🌷 Tulip’s pastel colors and waxy cuticle that scatters light give them a soft watercolor look. The “broken” petals of Semper Augustus, created by a virus, became some of the most famous and valuable flowers in history... and their genome is 34Gb 🤯

"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions" -Albert Einstein

One of my Arabidopsis micro-roses next to its wild type sister ✨ Now just to make it rainbow 🧬...

Flatworms are the golden retrievers of the microbe world🔬

Fantastic hosting the @GoogleDeepMind team at TSL with @kamounlab.bsky.social 🌱 From AI in plant health to building scientific capacity, our missions clearly resonate! Tools like AlphaFold can accelerate scientific breakthroughs in our field -holding real promise for global food security 🌍

Thanks for the support! Boas is a level 99 plant programmer 🧬

Ran into these AMAZING Stapelia grandiflora in our conservatory today. The patterns, colors, hairs, and the smell - carrion mimic to perfection. #Stapelia #plantjoy #iamabotanist

Heat-shock inducible CRE-LOX of RUBY making cool sectors in my primary transformants (though a bit leaky) 🌱🧬

Friday Flower 007: Petunia 💮✨ Petunias carry the active transposon dTph1, which powers mutant screens and paints stripey patterns as it jumps. Their five petals are fused, with diverse color designs tracing the corolla’s fusion seam.

Thermie really doing the most today

This little Arabidopsis fighting to keep up with the big ones 🥺

Fantastical flowers, synthetic biology, and storytelling. Giving an accessible science talk tomorrow at 10:40 UK time... come join! Register here for the link 👉 jic.link/NBIAST2025

This is amazing

Friday Flower 006: Aquilegia 🌸🦋 Columbines vary in stamen number, making them a powerful model for how floral whorls expand. Darwin marveled at their long nectar spurs, which co-evolve with hawkmoth tongues to reward pollinators that brush the stamens ✨

I find that so many biologists are also talented artists. @hsuanpai.bsky.social is a skilled technician and apparently good at any artistic media she touches.. even LB.

I finally picked up my "Epi-Bouquet 2" by @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social As a former plant scienctist I am loving it! It's a great shirt! 💐 🧪 You can find more on Nick at his website: www.nickdesnoyer.com/about

Engineering flowers as a means for public outreach and art! Dr. @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social reimagines Arabidopsis with new colors and shapes, blending plant biology, synthetic biology and creative arts! Hear him speak at SB 8.0 at the iGEM Grand Jamboree! jamboree.igem.org/2025/program...

Synthetic biology and art go hand in hand 🧬 🌹 Thanks Moeez for the invitation to hang out with peeps at London Synbio network!

Meet "Little Flower". A genetically engineered flower, frozen in time and blown up over 150X. Here's the story (1/6 🧵)

Showing off my Arabidopsis flower shirt from @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social at @cbgpmadrid.bsky.social

Accidentally made “black” Arabidopsis seeds. Under the microscope they look like little raisins 👀

Color changing flowers 🧬🎨- attempt #2 Older flowers (bottom) show dark red/ orange tints whereas young buds (top) display strong fuchsia color. Getting closer..

Doing my homework 📚

Friday Flower 005: Arabidopsis thaliana 🌱✨ A tiny flower, but a giant in research, thale cress enabled our understanding of flower development through the "ABC Model". With this knowledge, their flowers can be essentially reprogrammed to produce micro-roses 🧬🌹