Tom Ellis

Surely Ginger is uracil as she left the band first leaving the other 4 behind. Posh needs to be thymine as she’s the one that does the least important stuff. Scary and Sporty as G and A - they do the big lifting

Trump freezes $200 million in UCLA science and medical research funding, citing antisemitism The Trump administration has frozen roughly $200 million in National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other federal agency-funded research at UCLA, citing allegations the school d...

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...

A shotgun approach for highly multiplexed mammalian metabolic engineering Mammalian metabolic engineering is critical to advancing basic biology, bioproduction, and cell therapy. However, as pathway complexity increases, so does the size of both the combinatorial design spa...

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...

As an Imperial professor I warmly welcome this! So sick of my college name being associated with wonky units (although I have to admit the 0, 100 and 200 scale of Fahrenheit is quite a cool scale)

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

ooo - this would be cool to add!

So I think the rest of science needs to consider how this might play out. If peer-review becomes a post-thought and cost to publish becomes zero, what will the scientific literature looks like in 5 to 10 years and how will AI generated papers and paper mills abuse this? We need to plan for this.

Happy to hear that a disaster scenario I can envisage happening is a forced scenario. But I do think that a global cultural change is happening where preprints overtake peer reviewed papers in terms of importance to scientific progress - it's already happened in maths, physics and comp.sci

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...

Fankang Meng on X: "Excited to share our latest research on "Engineered Yeast Multicellularity via Synthetic Cell-Cell Adhesion & Direct-Contact Signalling" posted on @bioRxiv #synbio recently! 🧵🔗[DOI](https://t.co/7F0FXCrJmw)" / X Excited to share our latest research on "Engineered Yeast Multicellularity via Synthetic Cell-Cell Adhesion & Direct-Contact Signalling" posted on @bioRxiv #synbio recently! 🧵🔗[DOI](https://t.co/7F0FXCrJmw)

If you can stomach a jump back to Twitter/X, then you can read more about the work from the man himself in Fankang's tweets about the preprint last year...
x.com/DrFankangMen...

There's so much cool stuff in this paper, which also had big contributions from @willshaw.bsky.social and Keith Kam .If you like space and planets you'll love our acronyms: MARS, SATURN and JUPITER! 🪐🪐🪐 We'd definitely leaned in to the whole acronym thing with this one.

Engineering yeast multicellular behaviors via synthetic adhesion and contact signaling By designing synthetic toolkits for contact-based signaling (MARS) and cell-cell adhesion (SATURN), we program yeast to form multicellular structures and perform complex tasks, like building logic cir...

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...

Wow this is crazy! I didn’t know about this

As soon as one country that is perceived as doing high quality science mandates that all papers must be preprinted first (eg instead of OA) then it’s only a matter of time before those doing paper mills also start to preprint everything too to try and ‘capture’ the reputation.

IDT please. Then I can put in on my Oligocard 🤣

open access fees at journals are 20x this amount!

How do you plan to combat paper mills? If countries begin mandating preprinting then every paper - good or spam - is going to get submitted to preprint servers.

Intentionally moving this debate from X over to here to attract a reply from @richardsever.bsky.social who has probably thought about all of this a lot more than I have 😃

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.

and a short explainer on the project... www.chemistryworld.com/news/wellcom...

What’s the point of the Synthetic Human Genome Project? Why are scientists working to recreate the human genome from scratch?

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

Those are great books! I've never thought our work could be a route to glanding. I guess it could!

Could hormone implants allow us to boost focus, endurance and libido? In this latest instalment of Future Chronicles, an imagined history of future inventions, we journey to the 2030s, when hormone implants enabled users to boost everything from pain tolerance to libido...

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...