#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...

Would you pay $150 per article to post your preprint on @bioRxiv @aRxiv @medRxiv @chemRxiv etc.? Currently it’s free but a small cost could help offset running costs and also work as a barrier against paper mills and AIs just posting all the time and filling these sites up.

Many genetic circuits we design don't get through the DNA synthesis stage. They just cannot be built. This is not the future I was told about in 2010 😅

Sunset in Yorkshire as I zoom to Newcastle by train to catch up with my living materials collaborators at Northumbria University. Read two proposals and two papers on this train so far. The best way to travel. 🚆

We're making therapeutic bacteria but we want them to sense their surroundings, detect diseases, and treat these troubles For that, we need smart proteins So, we're looking for a post-doc protein engineer - leibniz-inm.softgarden.io/job/57549298... If this post inspires you, apply by 6th Aug!

White text on white background instructing LLMs to give positive reviews is apparently now common enough to show up in searches for boilerplate text.

What’s the point of the Synthetic Human Genome Project? www.chemistryworld.com/news/whats-t...

Hat tip to Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels for providing the inspiration for my symbiotic implants, which Banks calls “glanding” www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

This work is extraordinary. Fully synthetic DNA-based - yes they are made from DNA not proteins! - transmembrane receptors. The age the of creative programming of biology de novo to create never-before-realized functional novelty has arrived! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Just out: 'Aptamer-based burden biosensors' led by Alice in the lab. Funded by NSF-BBSRC in collaboration with @francolab.bsky.social, we show aptamers cause burden in E.coli. We then develop a burden biosensor for identification of low-burden genetic variants: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We're hiring for 2 postdocs to work in our lab in London on the newly announced Wellcome Trust SynHG project. If you know people looking to work on big-scale ambitious science like this, please RT and share this with them. Apply by 7/20, interviews in Aug. imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Engineering E.coli to assemble into flocks using ELPs. Very cool living material work.

It's 25 yrs to the day since the Human Genome Project & Craig Venter declared joint victory in sequencing the human genome - an ideal time for @wellcometrust.bsky.social to annouce their new project, involving our lab, to begin work towards synthesising human genomes. wellcome.org/news/researc...

Great review article: Genome synthesis in plants www.nature.com/articles/s44...

1/27 We have a new paper out! Turns out that snowflake yeast have been hiding a secret from us - they've evolved a (very!) crude circulatory system. Not with blood vessels or a heart, but through spontaneous fluid flows powered by their metabolism. 🧪🔬 www.science.org/doi/full/10....

From the same team that made vanilla for ice cream using E.coli that digest plastic waste.