One of the most interesting discoveries of the year - the immune function of degraded proteins Also fun to think about how this whole proteome coordination has evolved www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#Cellbio2025 come see the latest from the lab, including on opto/thermogenetics, condensates, RTK fusions, stress granules, biosensors of clustering. Talks and posters today and tomorrow!

Our neighbor @hugheslabpenn.bsky.social grows cool opto-kidneys, check them out!

#cellbio2025 please stop by my talk (Mon 4:35 evolution) and poster (Mon 12:45 #B479 optogenetics) tmr! Title: Intraprotein domain competition dictates pulsatile response of photoreceptors shaped by temperature and evolution. BcLOV4 as a model. I’m also looking for postdoc opportunities!

#CellBio2025 come check out the workshop on applying optogenetic tools in cell biology! Today (Sunday) at 5:30p in Rm 121. Note that this session does *not* appear in the app for some reason

In vivo proteomics www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

One receptor per neuron problem in ants 😯 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Super cool work from @levine-lab.bsky.social ! A great demo of how intra-genome conflict can result in rapid evolution of “essential” genes Congrats!

Super clever design and beautiful counterintuitive intracellular plasmid evolution! Congrats!

See y’all there!

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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 🧪

So sad to hear the news - John truly was an inspiration to so many, and one of a kind. www.cam.ac.uk/research/new...

Generative design of synthetic gene circuits for functional and evolutionary properties https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.26.678595v1

What if you could think of every possible solution to a problem? Then you might be able to simply pick the best one - even if it was highly nonobvious. With the “tiling tree” method, you can learn, and practice, the skill of doing just that: engineeringx.substack.com/p/the-tiling...

Sea slugs steal foreign chloroplasts for photosynthesis and starvation resistance. Photo by Anik Grearson. #evolution #symbiosis. #cellbiology. @cellpress.bsky.social

Thanks Misha for the shout-out! It has been a truly mind-opening journey. WHOLISTIC is one step towards whole-organism neuroscience and a true physiological observatory - with extensions on the way! I am continually amazed by what the data reveals - so much remains to be discovered and mined.

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Chimeric capsid tail assembly expanding host range for hosts. Wondering if we can engineer an AND gate delivery system out of this 🤔 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

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Feeling mitochondrially challenged lately? Here are two classic reviews on #mitochondria that should help. www.cell.com/current-biol... www.cell.com/current-biol...

Looking forward to trying it out!

The creative process in science has a set of thinking tools that we could do a better job teaching. Here are the 12 articles that Martin and I wrote about them, including "It takes two to think", "A hypothesis is a liability" and "The two languages of science". night-science.org/home/learn/r...

Wished it had more details, it weighs half after replication does not reject the dispersive replication hypothesis.

New paper 📣! Pixelgen reports its incredible new Proximity Network Assay (PNA)->3D maps of 155 proteins in single cells by sequencing by barcoded antibodies and in situ rolling circle amplification yields >40,000 spatial nodes/cell: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Now at molecular mechanisms in evolution GRC! Please stop by my poster tmr #1 and Mon/Tues #52! Will be presenting the Synergistic tuning of intramolecular feed-forward regulation shapes adaptive response of photoreceptors through domain co-evolution! Also see an earlier thread here:

Happy to announce our paper comparing embryonic gene expression between C. elegans and C. briggsae, work led by Christopher Large with Rupa Khanal and in collaboration with Junhyong Kim and Bob Waterston. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🐠🦠Why can’t bacteria swim like fish? At microscopic scales, physics changes — viscosity rules! Researchers at our institute study how microbes like E. coli overcome this challenge with clever strategies like run-and-tumble. Watch our new video: youtu.be/drwCRRD7CGY?...

Beautiful work Kalli and team! Congrats!🎉

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Wild that loss of Y chromosome seems contagious 🤯

Thanks for the invite! Really enjoyed the talks!

Synthetic biology could enable new types of programmable therapeutics. Our new preprint introduces synthetic protein circuits that selectively trigger cell death in Ras-mutant cancer cells, with interesting advantages compared to existing approaches. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Crazy…

Nature research paper: Chromatin loops are an ancestral hallmark of the animal regulatory genome https://go.nature.com/4kcNObU

🤯🤯 Fun fact about Botrytis cinerea (where we got BcLOV4 from!): they randomly split their genomes to different nuclei

Science.

Beautiful conceptual work here. Challenging mainstream world view of oncogenes being deterministic and with an average effect of promoting cancer. In fact rare stochastic escape from homeostasis might be enough for tumor progression.

Was a great first day of workshop at the intersection of cancer initiation, sysbio, and synbio! Looking forward to tow more days!

Are you interested in synthetic and systems biology approaches to study #spatiotemporal processes in cancer? Join NCI for virtual workshops on May 13, 15, & 20 (next week!) from 12:00–4:30 PM ET: registration: events.cancer.gov/nci/syntheti... #SynSysBio4SpatialCancerResearch

We have updated our database of funding opportunities for Early-Career Researchers (private foundations, federal, international) We have 456 entries, for which we provide $ amount, deadline, eligibility criteria, etc. Download this massive database here for free: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

Check out our Aviatar toolkit for optogenetic translocation to arbitrary organelles! Simple, modular, compact, and many more.

Nature research paper: Low overlap of transcription factor DNA binding and regulatory targets https://go.nature.com/4jedGUz

Super cool work from Toettcher lab turning a sensor into an actuator!

Pulsatory response of the BcLOV4 photoreceptor through intramolecular feed-forward regulation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.08.647774v1

The pyroptosis circuit looks impressive!