Tom Ellis

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

Generating long deletions across the genome with pooled paired prime editing screens Engineered deletions are a powerful probe for studying genome architecture, function, and regulation. Yet, the lack of effective methods to create them in large numbers and at multi-kilobase scale has...

Using prime editing to generate large deletions across the human genome

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Is it any good?

Agar plate maker?

Thank you to my home department back in London and the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust for making this exciting sabbatical possible @leverhulme.ac.uk @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social

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

A screenshot of the "Making Fungal-Photobiont Symbioses in the Lab: Past, Present, and Future of the Elusive in Vitro Lichen" by Arseniy Belosokhov and Toby Spribille published in Annual Review of Microbiology, Volume 79, 2025. Link: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-micro-051524-031834

#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?

What were these killjoy editors thinking? This is an amazing intro! Someone should feed this into an AI video generator and make it a clip.

@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)

Most interesting point was a decision to not allow any school teams. Why? High school teams with impressive coaching and funding from China have become a mainstay in iGEM, but their participation often feels more like a private business model for CV points than genuine projects.

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/...

Recommendation letters are academia's cryptocurrency. Panels mostly don't care what you actually write, they just want 'proof of work'.

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

#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

In the paper, @jazzsynbio.bsky.social
looks at how microbe and host engineering helps study holobionts of interests and the engineering challenges for going further. He gives a spotlight to some cool systems like lichen and hydra that could have future applications. www.cell.com/trends/biote...

Holobionts are fascinating, and a topic of study for the
@leverhulme.ac.uk Centre for Holobiont Research
here at @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social - broadly speaking they are a host organism whose life cycle is dependent on a community of other organisms, often microbes.

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 - Nature Communications Multi-template PCR enables parallel DNA amplification but suffers from sequence-specific biases. Here, the authors develop a 1D-CNN model predicting amplification efficiency directly from the DNA sequ...

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

Boolean logic-gated protein presentation through autonomously compiled molecular topology - Nature Chemical Biology Programming stimulus responsiveness into living systems enables advanced biocomputation. Here, the authors autonomously compile proteins with defined topology that can be site-specifically tethered to and conditionally released from biomaterials and cells following user-specified Boolean logic.

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 🧪