HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL OF YOU!🎄✨

New preprint! 🐝 We engineered a bacterial biosensor to reveal micron-scale arabinose gradients in the honeybee gut. Congratulations to Audam and all co-authors. Great collaboration with @pengellab.bsky.social as part of the NCCR Microbiomes at @fbm-unil.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A long standing goal in synthetic biology is ‘PURE makes PURE’ - effectively the start of self-replicating biology in a tube from just adding biochemicals and DNA instructions. This looks like a promising breakthrough from the Maerkl lab. 👀

So you think your mammalian plasmids have nothing to fear from cloning and propagation in E.coli? Quantitative profiling of millions of nucleotides by Tom Copeman will prove you wrong! Supervised with the amazing @proftomellis.bsky.social and AZ, now on BioRxiv: doi.org/10.64898/202...

New work from Francesca Ceroni's mammalian #synbio group - really cool study by Tom Copeman with input from AstraZeneca. I've been lucky to be part of this one.

Robotic petals plentyofroom.beehiiv.com/p/dna-flower...

Just when you thought we’d be safe from mirror life, then they come up with backwards life.

Why Grandma, what big emdashes you have

Congratulations to Dr Oliver Hernandez Fernandez who passed his PhD viva exam on Friday after 4 years at Imperial co-supervised by myself, Naomi Nakayama and Vahid Shahrezaei.

Great talk today at VISTEC from Thapakorn Jaroentomeechai whose setting up his SynGlyco Lab at Mahidol University in Bangkok 🇹🇭 - great use of synbio and cell-free systems to study and apply glycobiolgy.

A couple new #PhD opportunities to join my lab at the intersection of #synbio, #plantsci and #biotech as part of the Plant BioDesign doctoral programme spanning the University of York, University of Cambridge, University of Bristol and John Innes Centre. 1/4

Using prime editing to generate large deletions across the human genome www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today marks my first day at VISTEC in Rayong 🇹🇭 - warm hosts for my sabbatical in Thailand 🙏🏻 My family and I will be spending time here and Bangkok over the next 8 months making connections and collaborations in synthetic biology and living materials work.

🎄 Join us 6pm Thurs. Dec. 4 at Imperial! 🧬 How to build a protein Noah Sprent (Change Bio) 🦠 Engineering altruism: How metabolic exchanges shape synthetic microbial communities in bio-manufacturing Diego Ruiz (Ledesma-Amaro Lab / Imperial) t.co/4tHIVGUJzc

Join us and these amazing speakers next March'26 at Synthetic Biology for Health and Sustainability - an international conference held at the Wellcome Genome campus near Cambridge UK. Abstracts deadline: December 1st, 2025 Register here - x.com/gallowaylabm...

An artificial flower design toolkit

#Lichens form their complex thalli through a partnership involving at least a fungus and an alga. But can these living structures be rebuilt in vitro? For more than a century, people have tried. With @spribille.bsky.social we revisited 150 years of #lichen #resynthesis to ask: has anyone succeeded?

@sacrozhangt.bsky.social and I wrote a commentary on Jordi van Gestel and Carol Gross's latest paper, check it out! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Sadly, the Editors at PNAS rejected our initial introduction, which was a David Attenborough style voice over of the microbial Serengeti (included below)

Was interesting to hear today about the annual “SynBio Challenges” competition that has got going in China as a cheaper/free alternative to iGEM - m.synbiochallenges.com/application/...

Share your synthetic based-biology insights at #SynBio26! We welcome contributions from experts in biotech, genomics, computational, plant, or medical sciences to showcase the impact of advances in engineering biology on agriculture, personalised medicine, and diagnostics. 📎 bit.ly/3ZaYdwH

Meet our speakers for #SynBio26 🌟 Field experts will provide fascinating insights on how synthetic based-biology innovations are transforming human health and planetary sustainability. Submit an abstract by 1 December 2025 - bursaries available 📎 bit.ly/43nlbBW#SynBio26 #ALife ⚙️🧫

Why is George Pig carrying a bacteria?

A comprehensive genetic toolkit for Zymomonas mobilis; allowing rapid, high-resolution, combinatorial engineering of metabolic pathways. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.29.685439v1

DISCARD - The aim is to combine gene segments to create a new genome, but recombination events will cause localised or system-wide death.

TRANCERs: Engineering enhancers into autonomous tissue-specific expression cassettes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.27.684763v1

New Tuesday (Oct 28) in Heidelberg and online: kick off event of the Center for Synthetic Genomics: program and link to zoom: www.syn-gen.de/kick-off

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.

Please RP! A 4-day synbio and tissue engineering conference #MASSIV to transform biology and medicine together. Couldn't list all amazing speakers, so please check out this 👉https://www.massivconference.com/ Poster due is Nov 7, but will be extended. With @stemcellnetwork.ca and JST.

Predicting sequence-specific amplification efficiency in multi-template PCR with deep learning doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Assembly and cell-free expression of a partial genome for the synthetic cell https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682769v1

Massively parallel assay of human splice variants reveals cis-regulatory drivers of disease-associated and cell type-specific splicing regulation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.12.681955v1

Latest issue of curated #engineeredlivingmaterials feed: biomed.news/bims-enlima/... #ELMs via @biomednews.bsky.social includes research on: boolean logic-gated protein presentation (h/t @coledeforest.bsky.social), bacterial grown living materials (h/t @proftomellis.bsky.social) & more 🧪

Storing data in plants growyourown.cloud

Intracellularly Coupled Oscillators for Synthetic Biology https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.23.678067v1

Yesterday was the first day of autumn and guess what appeared in the window of the Peninsula hotel in London.

Nature’s glues. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another new paper from our lab - this time from Anastasiya Kishkevich who has developed "YTK Display-and-Secrete" a library-based method to identifying genetic designs good for protein secretion from S.cerevisiae yeast. Online now at ACS SynBio - pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Genetic entanglement enables ultra-stable biocontainment in the mammalian gut https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.13.670093v1

We are hiring a scientist to lead our 'Build' team at the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology. @alleninstitute.org Job posting below: alleninstitute.org/careers/jobs... Please reach out if you have any questions!

New paper from our lab on synthetic genome work in yeast is out - Iterative SCRaMbLE for Engineering Synthetic Genome Modules and Chromosomes. Exciting project led by Jane (Xinyu) Lu in our group, now online. t.co/0LuGwgAWlA

Unlock new organisms quickly with a genetic methods “cheat-sheet”🔬 Our Portal’s new Reported Methods section streamlines access to established genetic tools and related literature. Read more here: tinyurl.com/yj33bnyr

200 engineering/life science/medical grants, including my lab's NIH MIRA, have been suspended. In case you are wondering, this means immediately stop spending = stop paying salaries for students & postdocs. www.latimes.com/california/s...

- Model bacterial genomes as sequences of proteins - predict protein-protein interactions, operon structure, and protein function - infer phenotypic traits - design synthetic genomes with desired properties @macwiatrak.bsky.social @mariabrbic.bsky.social @andresfloto.bsky.social

InSillyClo, a user-friendly web application to assist large-scale Golden Gate Cloning and MoClo workflows https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.31.667881v1

#synbio folks, come and join us for the 10th annual Biochemical Society Synthetic Biology UK conference in London this November. www.eventsforce.net/biochemsoc/f...

Excited to share our work with @julietrolle.bsky.social & Jef Boeke. We developed a 'shotgun' method to screen millions of synthetic metabolic pathways to enable mammalian cells to grow without two essential nutrients for the first time in >500 million years! doi.org/10.1101/2025... Thread...

Many solutions! - arXiv's library membership and endorsement models could be copied blog.arxiv.org/2021/06/02/m... info.arxiv.org/help/endorse... - instead of charge/preprint, bulk sell redeemable barcodes (e.g. 20/yr/lab or 10k/yr/institute) - require auth, e.g. ORCID & penalise abusers

SOOOO MANY GENOMICS MODELSSSS! 😱 Often unclear which is best since they benchmark differently! In this preprint, we introduce GAME, a new framework that utilizes APIs to enable sustainable, uniform model evaluation so we can see which is actually best for each task. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Online now @ Cell is the yeast multicellular engineering paper from Fankang Meng - the fruits of his productive PhD in our group. He developed modular synthetic biology tools to bring multicellular behaviours to yeast - specific adhesion, juxtacrine signalling and more. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...