Jen Stiens

🚀 Excited to launch the #OpenCloning Assembler!

🧬 Built to demystify Golden Gate for beginners and save time for experts -> MoClo assembly blazing fast ⚡

✍️ Use existing syntaxes or design your own!

#SynBio #GoldenGate #MoClo #OpenSource #Biotech

👉 Try it: app.opencloning.org

Feedback welcome!

Born #OnThisDay in 1815 was mathematician Ada Lovelace. She is known for her work on the Analytical Engine with mathematician Charles Babbage, an early proposed mechanical computer for which she wrote one of the first algorithms. #WomenInSTEM

YouTube video by The Francis Crick Institute A Crash Course in Psychosis – with Katharina Schmack

What is psychosis and how can we treat it?

Crick group leader @kathaschmack.bsky.social explains how her lab is working to uncover new ways to treat psychosis by finding its biological roots.

youtu.be/EUb3_5ecatU

Hamilton Smith obituary: molecular biologist who co-discovered precise molecular scissors for cutting DNA Nobel laureate who helped to sequence the first bacterial and human genomes.

@jcv.bsky.social penned an obituary for Ham Smith in @nature.com. Since the early 90s, Ham has been a key figure at the Institute for his invaluable contributions and mentorship. "Ham was the best colleague that one could ever have in science and a great friend."

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Evidence for improved DNA repair in long-lived bowhead whale - Nature Analysis of the longest-lived mammal, the bowhead whale, reveals an improved ability to repair DNA breaks, mediated by high levels of cold-inducible RNA-binding protein.  &nbs...

Cold-inducible RNA-binding protein CIRBP: A whales secret to long life?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

OMG 🤯
That's some cool science there 👇🏻
👌🏻🎉👏🏻
#RNAsky

Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change.

Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned

A scene from terminator 2: Arnold: It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29.

Happy Skynet day to all who celebrate!

Dear Fly Community, In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled. The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC). Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options. To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum). To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase Our immediate goals are: 1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online 2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance). Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data. At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise. Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028. We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide. Sincerely, The FlyBase Team

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

Screenshot of the SOG home page.

We are pleased to share the Schizosaccharomyces orthogroup web resource (fsnibs10.github.io/SOG/) with the pombe community.

how (yeast) cells re-climb the fitness landscape when they are reprogrammed to a different telomere DNA sequences (human-like)? read the latest from @melaniadangiolo.bsky.social etal , with great help and insights from Eric Gilson, Jonas Warringer and @juliamuenzner.bsky.social (& Ralser lab)

The role of metabolism in shaping enzyme structures over 400 million years - Nature By combining structural biology and evolutionary genomics analyses, the evolution of enzymes over 400 million years is shown to be governed by catalytic function, metabolic network architecture, cost ...

A paper I have been working on with Oliver Lemke in the Ralser lab has just come out: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We used predicted structures to gain insight into the evolution of metabolic proteins in yeast.

A bit more in this linked-in post (www.linkedin.com/posts/benjam...).

YouTube video by Axios Axios’ Sara Fischer in conversation with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince

I will be brief. If you care about the quality of news we get, this clip is the most disturbing and important 20 minutes I have for you. If you have only 5 minutes to watch then do that. Via @michaelsocolow.bsky.social

Did you watch the clip? Now go to this link. www.cnbc.com/2025/07/01/c...

Nazi grok

My father worked in a tire factory in Appalachia. Friends and family in the military. Used to vote Republican. Got into college on a diversity program for the underprivileged. Ended up a Harvard professor. And now my funding is terminated because we're trying to stick it to the elites.

Awful news. Of no benefit to the US? Clearly uninformed, shortsighted and a disastrous on many levels decision.

London SynBio Network 9 London SynBio afterwork talks and networking event on Thursday 15th of May

Join us next week, 15th May, at UCL!

🧬 Using synthetic biology tools to optimise Cas9 expression in mosquito gene drives
Dr. Moeez Khan (Windbichler lab, ICL)

⚙️ Writing the future with synthetic DNA
Laurence Humphrey (Twist Biosciences)

events.humanitix.com/london-synbi...

🚀 Just added support for Cre/Lox recombination to hashtag#OpenCloning! 🧬✨
👇 Check out an example showing excision of a plasmid from a locus and re-integration using classic LoxP sites.

👉 Try it here: opencloning.org
🎞️ Demo video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0he...

London SynBio Network 8 London SynBio afterwork talks and networking event on Thursday 24th of April

🧬 If you are in London and you want to learn about a free & Open Source SnapGene/Benchling alternative that also supports automation 🤖, come to our next London Synbio Network meeting this Thursday 24th in Imperial!🎓

🎤 I’ll be giving a talk about #OpenCloning!

events.humanitix.com/copy-of-lond...

Congratulations, Melania! Well-deserved! 💪

Twitter is dead...

A bovine pulmosphere model and multiomics reveal early host response signature in tuberculosis - Communications Biology Modeling of early tuberculosis using bovine lung cell derived spheroids combined with transcriptomics and proteomics reveals early immune signatures of TB and highlights the model’s potential for biom...

Modelling of early tuberculosis using bovine lung cell derived spheroids combined with transcriptomics and proteomics reveals early immune signatures of TB and highlights the model’s potential for biomarker discovery and high throughput drug screening doi.org/10.1038/s420...

Feature selection methods affect the performance of scRNA-seq data integration and querying - Nature Methods This Registered Report presents a benchmarking study evaluating the impact of feature selection on scRNA-seq integration.

Papers like these can make a real difference in omics analysis good job benchmarking hvg methods for data integration 🖥️🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A Key Role of the EMC Complex for Mitochondrial Respiration and Quiescence in Fission Yeasts We used the Seahorse analyzer to accurately measure oxygen consumption rates in S. pombe cells. The analysis reveals that the universal EMC complex, a membrane protein chaperone/insertase that aids t...

A new link between the ER membrane complex and mitochondria: Modesto Berraquero, Víctor A. Tallada & Juan Jimenez show that deletion of oca3/emc2 in fission yeast leads to mitochondrial dysfunction, but is rescued by the disruption of ergosterol biosynthesis.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

#RNA rules

Pombase PomBase is the comprehensive model organism knowledgebase for the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe (S. pombe).

PomBase is GBC Global BioData Resource of the week www.linkedin.com/pulse/pombas...

Picture of the conference centre on the EMBL campus in Heidelberg

Do you love software engineering for exciting biological applications, open science,open source, R, Bioconductor, modern web, cloud& ML technologies?

We're looking for a software engineer to work on R/Bioconductor tools for biological data science and AI
embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

Generative AI exacerbates the climate crisis The economic benefits of generative artificial intelligence (AI) could reach US$7.9 trillion annually (1). The emergence of groundbreaking generative AI tools has spurred development (2). However, the...

"The combined electricity consumption of the AI and cryptocurrency industries reached 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022, accounting for about 2% of the global total energy consumption." 😮

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...