Tom Ellis

Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres - Nature Evolutionarily related ‘proto-point’ centromeres providing resolution to the evolutionary origins of point centromeres are identified in yeast, and comparison shows they evolved in an ancestor with re...

Our paper is now out in Nature:

“Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres”

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres.

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Slowpoke: An Automated Golden Gate Cloning Workflow for Opentrons OT-2 and Flex In synthetic biology, DNA assembly is a routine process where increasing demands for standardization, high-throughput capacity, and error-free execution are driving the development of accessible, auto...

🤖 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/...

A toolkit for programmable transcriptional engineering across eukaryotic kingdoms https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.10.705154v1

RFK Jr. Questions Efficacy Of Skin WASHINGTON—In a firm dismissal of decades of scientific research and real-world data on the organ’s benefits and safety, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly questioned t...

“Everything we know about skin has been learned from so-called scientific studies funded by large corporations who have a financial stake in keeping our musculature covered in an unnecessary layer of man-made flesh,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Does the noncoding genome actually carry more genetic information than coding seqs? Motivated by this question we mutated every bp in the 10kb MYC locus. Results are even more exciting: Decoding the MYC locus reveals a druggable ultraconserved RNA element www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

POV: Your cells died again! 😅

Occupational safety office, please close your eyes 🫣

#lablaughs #memesky #academicsky

Any bio artists out here? I’m interested in commissioning 1-2 pieces, leaning more towards the art side but love stuff that is science-inspired... DM me if you're interested!

Enjoyed listening to @adrianwoolfson.bsky.social on BBC 4 this week talking about synthetic biology at genome scale and what kind of step-change in capabilities are happening this decade. Interesting debate on the value of full redesign of genomes, versus iterative work. www.bbc.com/audio/play/m...

Excited for the first LSN of 2026✨ See you there!
events.humanitix.com/london-synbi...

Looking forward to my first zoom call with an AI author trying to persuade me that he's a real scientist so he can post to ArXiv.

Please 🔁

My group at UBC received an allocation from the school to apply for the Canada Impact+ Training Awards (postdoc). Everything is moving fast but please email me in 48 hours with a CV if you are outside Canada and interested😎
Yachie lab: yachie-lab.org
sshrc-crsh.canada.ca/en/funding/o...

I wrote a guide on constructive peer review. This is a polished version of an internal guide I had for my group. Of course, constructive feedback is welcome, peers!
deboer.bme.ubc.ca/2025/12/09/g...

I think we are reaching a point in time where believe first and doubt second, will be flipped to doubt first and believe second - and that mindset transition is going to have a painful hit on online life and society in general. Depressing. #iwanttobelieve

Which is worse - believing everything online is fake or believing everything online is real?

A genetically encoded device for transcriptome storage in mammalian cells Understanding how cells make decisions over time requires the ability to link past molecular states to future phenotypic outcomes. We present TimeVault, a genetically encoded system that records and s...

So cool - someone finally hacked 'the vault'.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Disney Geneticists Debut New Child Stars

they are all so humble

Overall we found genetic engineering and coculturing strategies possible in all strains, but with some being better than others. No single strain wins out as best for everything which is a shame, but future strain engineering may change this. Watch this space. 👀

And in a final bit of fun, they then showed how different engineered strains of BC-producing bacteria can weld their materials together in a patchwork form to create some interesting looking materials.

Stacey and Katie then went further and tested how the different bacteria can co-culture with engineered E.coli cells and engineered yeast cells, testing at different temperatures and assessing all sorts of metrics.

Stacey, Katie and Maria tested out genetic engineering using a modular SynBio toolkit (KTK) in 4 widely-used species of Komagataeibacter and compared successes and failures.

But different labs use different bacteria species due to historic reasons and whether engineering done in one species works in another is not clear. In this work we sought to address this through coordinated experiments in multiple labs.

What's this one about? It's about engineering different bacteria. We and many other labs around the world engineer and use kombucha-derived bacteria (Komagataeibacter) to make the bacterial nanocellulose fibres and hydrogels that form the bulk of new materials for dozens of applications areas.

New Engineered Living Materials #ELMs preprint up on BioRxiv #SynBio from our group in collaboration with the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment at Northumbria University and with some help from CSIC, Madrid.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL OF YOU!🎄✨

Engineered symbiont biosensor maps micron-scale sugar gradients in the honeybee gut The honeybee gut microbiota plays a key role in shaping host health and susceptibility to disease. Yet, the nutrient environment it experiences within the gut remains poorly characterized. In particul...

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. 👀

Quantitative profiling of millions of nucleotides reveals sequence-encoded interactions that govern plasmid propagation Plasmids are central to modern biotechnology, especially therapeutic development, yet their propagation in Escherichia coli remains difficult to predict. Although expression-induced burden is well und...

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.

DNA Flowers: Shape-Shifting Materials Bloom with Biomimetic Magic! Microscale DNA flower engineering transforms synthetic biology, creating innovative shape-shifting materials that mimic nature's adaptive molecular mechanisms.

Robotic petals

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