I engineer life for Mars. Most frequently asked Q: "But can't you just evolve organisms by slowly making it more and more Mars-like?" The answer is MAYBE. Step 1: figure out how to simulate Mars properly. Here's how we do it ➡️ t.co/TwNHzkmyXK

Happy to announce a new preprint from my former academic lab, where we use PACE to evolve halogenase enzymes! Congrats to Andre Pulschen and Justin Booth who led the study!

🧫 Meet the keynote speakers for the 2025 scverse conference! Erika Alden DeBenedictis, Co-founder of The Align Foundation & CEO of Pioneer Labs @erika-alden.bsky.social ‪ @alignbio.bsky.social @pioneerlabs.bsky.social #scverse #scverse2025 #StructuralBiology #Biotech #Stanford

📣 Evolutionary Scale is supporting the 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament! Teams get sponsored ESM inference through @evolutionaryscale.bsky.social's API (Forge), bringing frontier protein AI models into the competition. Level playing field, real experiments, open results. Register now 👇

By this time next year, either: 🏆 we'll have engineered PETase enzymes actually work industrially & recycle plastic ... or we'll know that AI-for-proteins is still a bit underbaked 😜 Excited to see what happens!!!! 😬 Spread the word ⬇️

Heads up: terraforming Mars isn’t just sci-fi, it’s a real possibility that’s possible with today’s technology. Mars could be green in MY lifetime. 🚀 🌼 What’s stopping us? We need a lot more real research into how to do it right. Don’t nuke Mars! 👇

I went to the 2025 Symposium on Biomaterials, Fuels and Chemicals with an invitation from @nils-averesch.bsky.social to speak about our work at @pioneerlabs.bsky.social engineering organisms for sustainable biomanufacturing on Mars! I took 80 pages of notes. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Can we do BETTER than evolution with the help of AI? It starts with data. 🧬 🔢 Check out @pioneerlabs.bsky.social's breakdown of how we get large-scale, high-fidelity data out of every engineering and evolution experiment!

This proposal is really interesting. Can you measure enzyme kinetics by adjusting substrate concentration *inside* the cell? On one hand, cells are noisy. On the other, enzymes behave differently in vitro & in vivo. Best to measure in the conditions you care about!

Very excited by all the execution that's happening at Align! 💪 You know me, I just want to be drowning in data 😛

Time for a LOT of microbe data! 📊 🦠 🤖 @alignbio.bsky.social is aiming to gather a core dataset composed of phenotypes for 1000 diverse microbes cultivated in 1000 diverse conditions. This labeled data has the potential to take our ability to predict how microbes will behave to the next level!

Government funding mechanisms for science need to evolve in the age of AI. 🤖 💰 How? Check out our Day One memo on how to repurpose 'Center' grants to fund large dataset acquisition.

🎄 @alignbio.bsky.social is hiring! Join The Align Foundation as the Chief of Staff or Open Science Admin and help make life science reproducible, scalable, shareable. 📍 Remote-friendly roles 🗓 Apply now, aiming to hire by Feb 2025 📧 Email cover letter + resume to [email protected]

•Switched gears to @erika-alden.bsky.social and Align to Innovate!! •she also switched gears from mathematical sims in astrophysics to biology and later on proteins ;) •mission: “interface of biology, automation, and machine learning to rapidly convert the life sciences to a data-first discipline”

Had a lot of fun with this interview with @agapakis.com. If you don’t know Christina, she is the one who resurrected an extinct flower scent during her time at Ginkgo. 🌸 Who better to talk about the big questions - like WHY we do science!

The first astronauts on Mars will use bacteria to make food, therapeutics & building materials. What do you feed the 🦠? Here's the recipe: - 40g of Mars dirt - 1 liter of water - Mix and strain In our substack post, Pioneer Labs defines how to mimic this recipe on Earth. 🚀🌼

The next Alphafold2 will be a predictive model of protein expression. I think it's possible, and @alignbio.bsky.social is going for it! 🧬 Every single protein engineering project I have ever worked on at one point or another ran into expression issues. 😠 It can't come soon enough! 🙏

E11 Bio making *headway* on brain mapping... 🧠😜

Started as Head of Data at Align to Innovate today! I am thrilled to join this team and be part of their mission! www.alignbio.org

In our most recent post we describe fragmenting a halophilic genome 🔪, building functional libraries 🪡 and selecting them 🤼 to find genes that measurably 📏 improved salt tolerance🛠🧂! Lab notebook links once more included if you want to dive into the details! open.substack.com/pub/pioneerl...

The next few years will see a huge transformation in how science works, on par with the enlightenment. FutureHouse is building AIs that can automate science and put the resulting knowledge into the open. Conversation with Freethink, now online here: www.freethink.com/artificial-i...