🤖 Announcement for Opentrons users - OT-2 & Flex 🤖 We developed Slowpoke, an open-source, automated Golden Gate cloning tool with Fankang Meng & @proftomellis.bsky.social at @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social Flex-optimisation by @gregorybatt.bsky.social at @pasteur.fr 👉 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

what a time to be alive

Aude Bernheim @audeber.bsky.social and Eugene Koonin discuss one of most interesting questions in the field connecting bacterial and animal immunity! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A Bacteroides synthetic biology toolkit to build an in vivo malabsorption biosensor doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Can @cultivarium.bsky.social please stop churning out amazing papers please

A genetic platform for a biocementation bacterium https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.05.692644v1

An unexpected mechanism for population heterogeneity in the gut microbiome: www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

How does linguistic bias reinforce privilege in science? #AppEnvMicro Editor in Chief @microgem.bsky.social offers insights and discusses how reviewers can identify it to support a more equitable review process. Read the article: asm.social/2Hp #COPE #PublicationIntegrity

Pretty science and pretty colours is a combination hard to beat

Now that we understood neutral dynamics, we turned to competition. What could cause one plasmid to replicate better than another? Our first thought was transcription might interfere with replication, and it turns out there was a much larger tradeoff than we expected! 7/

1/9 Metagenomics lets us read microbiomes in nature without cultivation, but writing (editing) them in their native context is still a major challenge. Meet MetaEdit: a platform for pathway-scale metagenomic editing inside the gut microbiome. science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In the UK, SUVs accounted for 63% of new sales in 2024. The proliferation of SUVs is one aspect of “carspreading,” whereby cars are becoming steadily larger over time and with this comes potential harms to health 🧵 www.bmj.com/content/391/...

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.

The logic of sabotaging the ability to hire trained researchers from abroad while simultaneously sabotaging the ability of US universities to train American researchers is truly baffling.

Check out our new paper: a review of translational coupling, the phenomenon where translation of one prokaryotic gene can promote translation of the gene downstream. We cover the history, and delve into the mechanism, which is still not fully understood. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

🚀 New publication alert! 🚀 We just published in @natbiotech.nature.com: 👉 Targeted DNA ADP-ribosylation triggers templated repair in bacteria and base mutagenesis in eukaryotes doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I love this diagram

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

The Friends of the @helmholtzhzi.bsky.social have awarded Gianluca Prezza the HZI PhD Award for his outstanding doctoral thesis. In #HIRI's @westermannlab.bsky.social, he investigated #sRNAs in the gut bacterium B. theta. 🦠👨🎓 Congrats, @gprezza.bsky.social! www.helmholtz-hiri.de/en/newsroom/...

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...

While writing my thesis, I kept wondering why I was putting so much effort in something that "nobody will ever read". Well, someone did and thought it deserved a prize! 🤯 Many thanks to people @westermannlab.bsky.social and Alex in particular for the support, supervision and, eventually, nomination.

Fantastic to see this work published, and the interest it has sparked! A tour de force by Anna Lindell and a interdisciplinary team I was honoured to contribute to.👉 PFAS are already in our environment and bodies, we urgently need ways to mitigate their impact 🧫🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/2

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-...

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...

Excited to share my PhD work! We used a low-input RNA-seq protocol to dig into what drives cell shape differences in Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. Congrats and big thanks to all co-authors 🧫🧬.

Bacteroides Theta-Iota-Omicron is polymorphic already in its name. What are the differences between the morphotypes? We tried to answer this with a combination of mechanical separation of cells based on their shape and an ultra-low input RNA-seq protocol. Paper from @elisebor.bsky.social here 👇

Did you think you needed a promoter for CRISPRa? Think again!

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

“Hello World” written with living flies 🪰 🧪 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

I'm sorry what 🤯

Here is the Bonsai visualization of a realistic dataset. In contrast to UMAP or PCA, the Bonsai tree accurately reflects the structure in the data. Not only visually, but the correlations between the true distances and distances in the Bonsai representation are close to 1 for almost all cells.

It seems there are no free-living organisms known to rely exclusively on one other organism for their survival Until perhaps now Check out our latest publication in @natmicrobiol.nature.com to see how we designed an exclusive microbial reliance using GCE rdcu.be/ekepI 1/2

Very happy to share our newly published work! We engineered phages for intercellular communication in multicellular consortia and integrated it with CRISPR-based gene regulation for biocomputing. Congratulations to @astrikusuma.bsky.social @dmf-unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social rdcu.be/ehORO

PRETTY AWESOME Sidor et al. PNAS take a single enzyme from a marine sponge and express it in E. coli, conferring the ability to self-assemble bioglass from silica precursors present in ocean water End result? Living, light-focusing microlenses that persist for months Cheap, durable photonics

If you want to do single-cell RNA-seq on your favourite bacterium, here‘s our detailed Nature Protocol for microbial MATQ-seq. It profiles up to 600 genes in a single bacterial cell! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Timescales in Cell Biology

LIDAR is out! rdcu.be/efugD We are one baby step closer to making it useful for therapeutics. NIH high-risk high-reward program provides key support.

A Review in Nature Reviews Bioengineering discusses the recreation of bioinspired colouration and dynamic colour change mechanisms for applications in optics, sensors and biomedicine. https://go.nature.com/3Y3wYmQ 🔒

who doesn't enjoy some beautiful FtsZ rings on a sunday evening? these from 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘶𝘴, from all angles, by the @jwveening.bsky.social, posted earlier on 𝕏, on may 6, 2021 Movie S2 from journals.plos.org/plospathogen... #MicroSky

Sharing exciting work led by PhD students McCallum and Burckhardt! We created a new series of syn bio tools in Bacteroides to create non-invasive, real time and sensitive in vivo gut biosensors. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Love me some RNA-seq based biosensor development. Wonderful work!

So very grateful and proud to have been a part of this paper, and now this cover! @proftomellis.bsky.social

Had a lot of fun at our 2nd in-person meeting for Sustainable Style UKRI Engineering Biology Mission Award with Northumbria University collaborators and Colorifix coming to Imperial before we all headed to Modern Synthesis to see bacterial cellulose being made into exciting textiles.

First post with exciting news! If you need to design gram-positive bacteria, our comprehensive genetic toolkit, SubtiToolkit (STK), can be really useful! Check out our recent study in @cp-trendsbiotech.bsky.social. STK coming soon to @addgene.bsky.social! #SynBio #Biotech 👇 doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

The Eligo team did it again! We just shared on biorxiv the work we did towards the development of a CRISPR-Cas therapy targeting Shiga Toxin producing E. coli (STEC). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

TIGR might have some advantages over CRISPR in genome editing (absolutely tiny, no PAM), but more importantly it's just some really neat, mysterious biology. Maybe TIGR is used by phages to fight other viruses? We don't know yet! Many many many questions left.

Major breakthrough by the Bumann lab @biozentrum.unibas.ch: Antibiotic killing of starved Salmonella is uniformly slow. Usually reported "biphasic killing" with highly resilient persisters is an artifact of CFU readouts because plating on high nutrients kills many previously drug-exposed cells. 😳🧨👇🏼

Remember that Europe (@ebi.embl.org) has mirrored all these services and they will keep on running. They look and feel a bit different but do the same thing. I think @ewanbirney.bsky.social should be able to confirm. www.europepmc.org www.ebi.ac.uk/jdispatcher/...

Every once in a while we publish a paper that moves a whole field forward. I think that's the case for this one from the Bugaj lab, where they describe proteins for THERMOGENETIC control of cellular behavior. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

You want to learn about microbiology from a fantastic lineup of speakers on a beautiful Greek island? PhD students apply now for the @EMBO | @FEBSnews Lecture Course The New Microbiology! Registration: 1 Apr 2025 Course: 03 – 11 Sep 2025 | Spetses, Greece meetings.embo.org/event/25-new...