Rofl, the UK has "no legal framework, making gender recognition impossible" Thanks to the @ilgaeurope.bsky.social for this analysis. Amazing stuff, really should ram home to everyone what exactly has happened in the UK's regression.

Every child should be able to play football without worrying about how they look www.wearequeeraf.com/every-child-...

After France, Denmark is moving too: its Digitalisation Ministry plans to phase out Microsoft, switching to Linux and LibreOffice in the coming months. The goal is clear—reduce dependence on a handful of global tech giants and strengthen digital sovereignty.

The last 24 hours have shown what many have said for a long time. Britain's role as an accomplice to Trump's America must end. We must urgently decouple from a rogue US & seek security with allies closer to home. That starts with suspension of the US bombers on British soil.

I *love* women's sport And I am forever grateful for the parts of women's sports that love me back

Anyways, solidarity with the trans community in India. You all deserve so much better 💔

The new trans bill in India takes away the right to self identify gender identity, delegitimises trans people and strips them of their fundamental rights. It medicalises identity and criminalises community care. It is completely inhumane and unconstitutional.

a bit about the recent anti-trans bill passed in both the houses of Indian parliament: this bill is an amendment to the 2019 Transgender People (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019 which - though not free of flaws - was a great leap for trans rights in India, and was a result of years of activism.

Wading into the Harry Potter discourse to remind you that India just passed a disastrous bill that removes the right to self identification of gender identity, despite vehement opposition from the trans community.

We are facing a workers' rights crisis for our community, and we need your help. Outdated workplace regulations, last updated in the early 90s, are now being interpreted as requiring the exclusion and outing of trans+ people in the workplace. actionnetwork.org/letters/fix-...

A statement on the IOC's decision to reintroduce mandatory sex testing for women. Please share widely. Alt text follows in the following posts.

I am not even all that worried about professional trans athletes with regards to the SRY-gene-based ban from the Olympics. I worry about all the many intersex/DSD women who are caught up in this. Historically, invasive sex tests based on genetics have led to suicides

With today's IOC decision to test based on presence of SRY genes in female athletes, it's worth revisiting this article about the researcher who discovered the SRY gene. Despite claiming otherwise, this ban in unscientific and intrusive

The focus, as usual, will be on trans athletes here to get buy in from everyone but the real impact will be on all female athletes and will disproportionately fall on intersex athletes. It's going to be a horror show. I expect legal challenges will eventually overturn this but it will take decades.

the quoted article here is a pretty gross example of the institutional anti-trans bias of papers like the Guardian! it uncritically accepts the IOC's "inherent advantage" and "scientific consensus" framing despite the fact that recent meta-analyses have found little to no advantage

Also, we are back to regular #transphobiathursdays scheduling now it seems. Last year, it was practically a new ban every thursday (including the FA ban on trans-inclussion in women's football. Note also the timing right before Trans Day of Visibility

I'm not terribly surprised, yet dumbfounded by this decision to do a universal IOC ban on trans women in women's sports, especially given olympic sports as of late has included sports such as breakdancing 🤦🏻‍♀️

Absolute cowardice from Lib Dems, refusing to have banners up supporting transgender people in the event that anti-trans people will harass party members on social media. First of all, why is nothing done to curb this toxic online envious created by these transphobes?

Stoic: Fast and accurate protein stoichiometry prediction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.13.711535v1

Constant companions is such a nice tool for introducing the concept of plurality to someone who is questioning... My friend has recently come to terms with the fact she might be plural, so I showed her the album, and IMMEDIATELY she was like "woah, that's me!" #plurality #jamiePaige

Considering what is happening in the world we should repurpose SynBio as an instrument of peace & healing, not just as an engine of economic development. Frontline biotech can help repairing the damage caused by war, explosions, oil leaks & fires not only to people but also to the environment 🙏🏻

Our dependency on fossil fuels makes us vulnerable. Wars across the world are pushing up prices for households in the UK. Why keep waiting for the next crisis? We need to transition to clean power as fast as we can to protect people and our economy. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Why must we have an HMPO that is so utterly incompetent? My friend got her change of name for her passport denied on her passport, despite using her years old unenrolled deed poll as documentation, on the grounds that the deed poll wasn't formatted right. Yet, this is HMPOs own guidance:

when ur confronted by a group of cops they will almost always give u conflicting information and instructions, each one of them wants to be the one in control. this gets even more stressful and confusing when weapons or force are involved. fight or flight is a natural response.

one takeaway from the grok noncon porn thing is that much of the media just isn't interested in an issue they can't pretend has two sides or that doesn't give them an opportunity to shit on the left. Also it would be uncomfortable to justify remaining on twitter after acknowledging it

I cannot believe it, Grok is being used to make real-time fake revenge porn against women on twitter as a misogynistic means to silence them, and this is the tepid response from UK regulators...

We have two job openings for computational strain design in our group! Please retweet 🧪 PhD student and postdoc! Both positions are directly with our group leader, Steffen Klamt. The positions are to be filled in Magdeburg, Germany. I highly recommend applying!

The road to hell is paved with "legitimate concerns"

A new review paper from our lab courtesy of @jazzsynbio.bsky.social is published in Trends in Biotechnology In this review, we look at the many opportunities for synthetic biology to be used in the research and applications of Holobionts.

SHARK: a specialized host for assembling R6K plasmids doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Our democracies rely on the idea that we all share the same reality, but the increasing disinformation in the mainstream media is a serious threat to the very concept of objective truth. In trying to gain clicks by being first on their news stories, legacy media are neglecting their responsibilities

Although I've now taken a back seat, it is great to see the growing adoption of SBOL Visual in the synthetic and engineering biology literature and even more awesome to see so many current and visiting students to my lab on the author list😍 Roll on 2035! arxiv.org/abs/2507.04601

What to agument your favourite protein with new functionalities? 🛠️ We've got a #biodesign workflow to help with that! In work led by @georgiehs.bsky.social we present SIMPLIFE that blends biophyscial and #ML models to extend biology in useful ways. #synbio doi.org/10.1101/2025...

90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.

Here is our paper on generating a Monkeypox vaccine candidate www.nature.com/articles/s41... led by Bernie Moss lab. Plug-and-display VLPs give a high level of protection, beating the standard Vaccinia-based vaccine. #mpox #vaccines #synbio

Recombinases your thing? In the latest from my lab, Veronica Greco shows how @nanopore sequencing + automated liquid handling provides the perfect platform for characterising these systems at scale! Awesome collaboration with @jennbrophy.bsky.social @sarah-guiziou.bsky.social doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Proper scary stuff, the hospital next door is on fire and the maternity ward has been evacuated www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Happy that my university building was able to provide a space for the maternity ward to seek refuge in

Sign up for our EngBio Forum on 7 May with talks from Irina Borodina,Technical University Denmark and Louise Horsfall @lehorsfall.bsky.social @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social both leading experts in the field of sustainable bioproduction. Register and details here 👉 www.tickettailor.com/events/engin...

The first version of this post had a broken link and I deleted it. Please spread again this corrected version. Thanks😊.

Phenotyping motile microorganisms is always a challenge. In the latest from the lab led by Andrea Giusti, we show how our #DOME platform can speed up the processes, enabling data-centric inference of digital twins and routes to multicellular control! 🦠💨🔦 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Reflecting on the two days of #sbuk24 talks on the very slow journey home, I think my favourite was Scott Stacey from Harrison Steel's group. Lovely demonstration of complexity built from simple biology that needs modelling to fully understand an unexpected result

I just read another paper that didn’t deposit their plasmid sequences anywhere. It doesn’t have to be Addgene, but gbk file on Zenodo would be good. I literally have no way to find out the exact modifications to the constructs from the text. Journals shouldn’t allow this.

Nice summary! It was a priviledge presenting to you

A quick update at #SBUK24 from Anne Ferguson-Smith, Executive Chair of @BBSRC on the importance of #EngineeringBiology for the future of UK research and the development of the UK #bioeconomy. It's great to see that UKRI are just as excited about the future of the field as we are!

Best thing about my job... sharing science 🔬🧬👩‍🔬🧑‍🔬 and sharing food 🍣🍔🍗🥗! Thanks to Lucia Marucci's lab for the early joint Christmas science spectacular and pot luck lunch 🥳 #synbio at Bristol is going from strength to strength 💪

#SBUK24 has begun, and I am fortunate to be here at this beautiful venue. I'm even more fortunate to be presenting my work on engineering T7-RNA polymerases here tomorrow at 15:15!

I've always been fascinated by #unconventional #computers. Check out our latest work led by Tony McCaffrey in which we present constructor algorithms that "build" computers with numbers encoded as physical lengths. Now imagine "growing" these with #synbio! arxiv.org/abs/2309.10082