Chang Liu

Onwards and Upwards: Remembering Dr. Andrew D. Hanson - Horticultural Sciences Department Honoring Dr. Andrew D. Hanson, Eminent Scholar and UF Hort Sci Professor, whose visionary research and mentorship shaped plant biology.

I'm very sad to learn of Prof. Andrew D. Hanson's passing. Andrew was a pioneering plant (synthetic) biologist full of insight, clarity of thought, and vision. He was also exceptionally kind and wise. I will cherish our interactions and collaborations. blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/hosdept/2025...

Love it! Congrats Jeff and team!

Excited to share our new preprint, which was years in the making! chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...
New reactions are typically developed by trial and error. How can we speed up this process? Read on to learn how we used DNA scaffolding to perform >500,000 parallel reactions on attomole scale.
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Directed evolution of LaccID for cell surface proximity labeling and electron microscopy - Nature Chemical Biology LaccID, an engineered laccase, enables hydrogen-peroxide-free proximity labeling and electron microscopy (EM) in mammalian cells. Notably, LaccID is selectively active at the cell surface, enabling th...

A new paper from @aliceyting.bsky.social reports on LaccID, an engineered laccase, that enables hydrogen peroxide-free proximity labeling and electron microscopy of cell surfaces

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

K2 Therapeutics

Our new company, K2 Therapeutics, is off to the races to develop new antibody drugs that target multipass membrane proteins. We are hiring so check us out! www.k2-tx.com/home#careers

An orthogonal T7 replisome for continuous hypermutation and accelerated evolution in E. coli Systems that perform continuous hypermutation of designated genes without compromising the integrity of the host genome can substantially accelerate the evolution of new or enhanced protein functions....

Happy to see this new T7 replicon based orthogonal replication system in E. coli. Congrats to the Diercks and Schultz lab teams at Scripps Research! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Junior, Assistant, or Associate Specialist – Xue Lab University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more.
recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

Congrats Olek!

We find that low copy number accelerates fixation of beneficial mutants while high copy number lets more deleterious alleles hitchhike in cells with fit alleles. High copy number also promotes a form of functional robustness through maintenance of allelic diversity.

The role of plasmid copy number and mutation rate in evolutionary outcomes - Nature Ecology & Evolution In an experimental multicopy plasmid evolution system that allows manipulation of mutation rate and copy number, low copy number promoted enrichment of beneficial alleles whereas high copy number main...

Happy to share this work, led by Olek Pisera, on dialing in a wide range of copy numbers for the orthogonal plasmid of OrthoRep. We used this ability to study how plasmid copy number influences evolutionary outcomes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Directed evolution of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases through in vivo hypermutation - Nature Communications Genetic code expansion (GCE) enables the incorporation of new amino acids into proteins. Here, authors demonstrate the rapid OrthoRep-driven evolution of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases for GCE, increasing...

Happy to share the peer-reviewed and updated version of our work on OrthoRep-driven evolution of aaRSs for genetic code expansion with unnatural amino acids. Congrats to Yuichi Furuhata, a true master bioengineer, on leading this excellent work! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats Olek and Alireza!

Going forward, we’ll be using this system, ORACLE (OrthoRep Assisted Continuous Library Evolution), to find evolutionary innovations from more libraries against more additional selection pressures in service of both the basic understanding of gene evolution and applications.

We hope the abundance of examples we provide where unexpected genes evolve new function will update views on the likeliness of originating new biomolecular functions in nature.

...when the diversity of genes available as sources of new function is large and when the systems level complexity of cells is available to afford multiple routes to new selectable phenotypes.

Rapid continuous evolution of gene libraries towards arbitrary functions The emergence and evolution of new gene functions is central to biology, yet experimental tools that allow us to prospectively probe and understand this process are lacking. While systems for continuo...

We’re excited to share new work on the continuous in vivo evolution of gene libraries towards arbitrary functions. Led by superstar Olek Pisera, our experiments show that gene evolution is highly versatile...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#SyntheticBiology postdoctoral position in our group in University of Florida's Horticultural Sciences department. Work is directed evolution to improve enzymes that underlie important crop traits ⬇️

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DOGE ends America’s golden age of biomedical research Biomedical research impacts all of us. I became curious about how drugs work after my mom was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when I was a small boy. She received “gold shots” as treatment, which ...

My story: I’m a single father and cancer researcher whose wife died of a rare cancer. Science and biomedical research is personal to me. Here is my op-ed in my hometown newspaper. Pls fwd.

www.vindy.com/opinion/edit...

We have to stand up for science! Anyone who can join these rallies and believes that US science must be protected should come! @standupforscience.bsky.social

NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately The move halts a large slice of money for most universities and research institutions virtually overnight, imperiling vital research in everything from cancer to heart disease.

Another assault on US competitiveness at a time when biomedicine is roaring with innovation, an own-goal in a high-stakes international tournament. Of course the real losers are American people needing medicines and cures.

www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

This is amazing! Congratulations Michael and team!

Ultra-Efficient Integration of Gene Libraries onto Yeast Cytosolic Plasmids Efficient methods for diversifying genes of interest (GOIs) are essential in protein engineering. For example, OrthoRep, a yeast-based orthogonal DNA replication system that achieves the rapid in vivo...

Integrase-assisted transformation allows OrthoRep-driven evolution to start from very big libraries. Efficiency is even higher than the transformation of normal nuclear plasmids into yeast, because OrthoRep is cytosolic. Great job Olek, Yutong and team! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bravo!

4) Rapid enzyme evolution, including artificial metalloenzymes to observe and probe the evolutionary emergence of allostery
5) Gene birth: can various classes of random sequences, shaped by selective constraints of intracellular compatibility, evolve into well-behaved proteins?

1) Solving epitope-specific antibody generation with both evolution and design
2) Understanding fitness landscapes and the contributions of contingency and epistasis in protein evolution
3) Strategic generation of domain-specific evolutionary data for ML and protein design

Postdoctoral Scholar – Protein Evolution and Synthetic Biology University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

We have new postdoc positions available. Please apply if you are interested in protein engineering, continuous evolution, OrthoRep, and/or synthetic biology! recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09324. Some particular problems we have a unique angle of attack on include…

Engineering+ Health Institute Announced | Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine

We're starting a new Institute for Engineering + Health at UCI to focus on Rapid Antibody Engineering and Evolution! engineering.uci.edu/news/2024/11...

Open-ended molecular recording of sequential cellular events into DNA - Nature Chemical Biology Loveless, Carlson and colleagues describe peCHYRON, a DNA recorder that propagates an unending chain of insertions. Each link contains a randomizable 3-bp ‘signature’ sequence that serves to record a ...

Our work describing molecular recording of sequential information by directing a chain of insertions with prime editor in mammalian cells is now out here - nature.com/articles/s41.... Congratulations to @theresaloveless.bsky.social, Courtney Carlson, and the whole team!

Continuous evolution of user-defined genes at 1 million times the genomic mutation rate When nature evolves a gene over eons at scale, it produces a diversity of homologous sequences with patterns of conservation and change that contain rich structural, functional, and historical informa...

Our work describing extensive gene divergence on laboratory timescales with upgraded OrthoRep systems is now out here - science.org/doi/10.1126/.... Congratulations to Gordon Rix and team!