Una Wen-lii Nattermann

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🚀 Announcing the 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament.

This year’s challenge: design PETase enzymes, which degrade the type of plastic in bottles. Can AI-guided protein design help solve the climate crisis? Let’s find out! ⬇️

#AIforBiology #ClimateTech #ProteinEngineering #OpenScience

Heads up: terraforming Mars isn’t just sci-fi, it’s a real possibility that’s possible with today’s technology.

Mars could be green in MY lifetime. 🚀 🌼

What’s stopping us? We need a lot more real research into how to do it right. Don’t nuke Mars!

👇

With bioinformatics, we’re now measuring the fitnesses of millions of DNA fragments! This gets us data on whole genomes and is the first step toward big data for modeling genotype -> phenotype with AI/ML for microbial evolution. Link in comments.

🧬 + 🔢 = 📈 -> 🤖?

🚀 New proposal from Align! The experimental platform aims to standardize #microbial #phenotyping & support predictive modeling. 🦠 Capturing data across 1k strains & 1k conditions; using BacterAI; generating high-quality datasets for ML @jensen_lab

We want to engineer microbes that can get all essential nutrients from Mars. To do so, we need to know what is biologically accessible so we did a deep dive into how Mars regolith has been simulated & suggest a liquid media recipe for testing & engineering strains. Read more 👇🏼

Ever wonder how we’ll unlock Mars as a living world? 🌏 In our substack post we break down the 'red planet recipe'—the chemistry of mars soil — for growing life on another world. Dive into the science to find out more!

The first astronauts on Mars will use bacteria to make food, therapeutics & building materials.

What do you feed the 🦠? Here's the recipe:
- 40g of Mars dirt
- 1 liter of water
- Mix and strain

In our substack post, Pioneer Labs defines how to mimic this recipe on Earth. 🚀🌼

🏆 A Biologist’s Guide to Mars Dirt Just add water

Check out 🏆A Biologist’s Guide to Mars Dirt, where we present a receipt for soluble Mars Regolith Media (sMRM) that best simulates what you’d get if you added water to Mars dirt.

Will anything grow in this media? Stay tuned!

💧+ 🪨 → 🌱 ?

open.substack.com/pub/pioneerl...

Want to follow along as we engineer microbes for circular biomanufacturing in space? We're launching open science updates through our substack! ⬇️

Would love to be added, thank you for putting this together!