Elisha Krieg

Thank you! :)

Reconfigurable Microenvironments Uncover Mechano‐Sensing Timescales and Direct Cell Polarity (Adv. Funct. Mater. 49/2025) Programmable Nanomaterials This cover illustrates the internal architecture of a DNA-crosslinked cell-culture matrix (DyNAtrix). Dynamically switchable DNA crosslinks regulate mechanical interactions...

Link: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Thanks to Advanced Functional Materials for highlighting our work on their back cover!

LASSO: versatile and selective biomolecule pulldown with combinatorial DNA-crosslinked polymers Current methods for sequence-selective biomolecule isolation suffer from high cost, off-target effects, and limited flexibility. Here, we introduce LASSO (cross L ink- A ssisted S equence- S elective ...

LASSO can be used for DNA, RNA or protein pulldown.

Excitingly, it outperforms gold standard rRNA depletion methods for #RNAseq library construction.

Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Big congrats to Dr. Krishna Gupta for winning the best poster prize at Oxford Global’s NextGen Omics conference in London, where he presented our work on #LASSO pulldown polymers. 💪

LASSO is a new general-purpose method for fast and ultra-selective biomolecule purification.

Growing functional artificial cytoskeletons in the viscoelastic confinement of DNA synthetic cells - Nature Chemical Engineering Engineering structurally and functionally complex synthetic cells remains a key challenge. Here DNA condensate synthetic cells combine phase separation and DNA nanostructures to reveal how switchable ...

Fresh in @natchemeng.nature.com Growing artificial cytoskeleton in the viscoelastic confinement of DNA Artificial Cells. Brilliant work bey Weixiang! #Syntheticcell #systemschemistry
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

ATP‐Powered Signaling Between Artificial and Living Cells We introduce an ATP-powered artificial cell platform capable of selectively and transiently releasing DNA signals to facilitate communication between artificial and living cells. By engineering these...

Congratulations to Soumya and Charu for making the first ATP-fueled homeostatic cytokine delivery system for communication between artificial and living cells. Now in Angewandte Chemie @angewandtechemie.bsky.social #syntheticcell #noneqsys #DNAnanoscience
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Multiplexed detection of respiratory viral pathogens by isothermal amplification on an autonomously loaded chip at the point-of-care Recent viral outbreaks have shown the need for reliable diagnostic platforms to rapidly detect various viral and bacterial pathogens at the point-of-care. Over the last decade, isothermal nucleic acid...

Full article:
pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

Multiplexed detection of viral pathogens on an AUTONOMOUSLY LOADING chip for point-of-care #diagnostics.

Congrats to first authors Beatrise Berzina and Krishna Gupta and the entire EKFZ-funded *VirChip* team!

New Perspectives on the Hidden World of Proteins  Schering Young Investigator Award 2025 goes to Agnes Toth-Petroczy

Schering Young Investigator Award 2025 by the Schering Stiftung for Agnes Toth-Petroczy @tothpetroczylab.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social. She receives the award for her work on the evolution, diversity, and function of proteins. Congratulations! 🎉 www.mpi-cbg.de/news-outreac...

This type of technology is used on cryptocurrency hardware wallets. Even though no technology is 100% safe, that's as good as it gets.

I think technology can at least mitigate the other side of the problem, which is that our incentive structure is broken. Ideally we'd fix the latter was well.

I agree with both points.

On the technology side, we have things like Secure Element Chips, where the signing happens directly on the hardware. The private key never leaves the device (e.g. it could happen inside an AFM). The image and its metadata would already be signed when it reaches the user.

This is doing the rounds in my messages with colleagues, and is a very real threat to the field of microscopy 😬.

Given one (published) microscope image probably costs between $100 and $10,000 (or more) to make - the lure of "oh I will just ChatGPT it" is very much there.

Yes absolutely. And ideally microscope manufacturers should have their instruments digitally sign all raw images, this way faking raw images would become very difficult.

I knew from the beginning, have been following this story...

lol, of course.

Interesting. For me, looking 15 min on a story like that, this is puzzling how it can happen. I hope these types of disputes can be conclusively settled in the future, once instruments digitally sign raw data that is appended to all manuscripts.

Elsevier's production error: A giant image duplication | Mu Yang posted on the topic | LinkedIn WAIT, WHO did WHAT and HOW and WHY??? As many of you read in my post yesterday https://lnkd.in/eQKTFmMe, a correction was published to relace an images with salient image duplications. When asked, th...

Reminds me of: www.linkedin.com/posts/mu-yan...

Seems to be a weird compression artifact (?) What does the journal say? The author seems to be helpful in providing the raw images (though the scale bar is indeed off :D)

True. Those manipulations were always just the tip of the iceberg.

Fair! There is a potential solution we had originally discussed, but it didn't make it into the final version: If manufacturers make their microscopes *digitally sign* all raw images, they become very hard to fake. This is done already for things like forensic data but rarely in academic research.

The rising danger of AI-generated images in nanomaterials science and what we can do about it - Nature Nanotechnology Generative AI has made it trivial to generate fake microscopy images that are indistinguishable from real images, even for experts. As researchers in nanoscience, it is time for us to face this realit...

Full story: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

AI can now generate fake microscopy images that are nearly impossible to detect. A serious threat to scientific integrity—and we’re not prepared for it.

Commentary in @natnano.nature.com

#nanotechnology

Reconfigurable Microenvironments Uncover Mechano‐Sensing Timescales and Direct Cell Polarity A synthetic DNA-crosslinked cell culture matrix enables control over the mechanical microenvironment surrounding cells. Independent tuning of stiffness and stress relaxation uncovers distinct timesca....

Big congrats to first author Syuan-Ku Hsiao, and big thanks to our collaborators Alf Honigmann, Carsten Werner, and Markus Mukenhirn (@markusmukenhirn.bsky.social)!

Read the full story here: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

#CellBiology #Organoids

4/

DyNAtrix also allowed us to measure "resonance bands" of the cell's mechanical interactions with their environment, revealing the timescales at which these interactions take place.

(Check out Supp. Info. Note S1 to understand how exactly this works) 🤓

#Mechanobiology

3/

Here you see a kidney cyst inverting its polarity after we added synthetic DNA signals.

These signals enter the material and "flip switches" that change its stress-relaxation time.

For the first time, switching ECM stress-relaxation can be done reversibly and during an ONGOING cell culture!

2/

Exciting application of our programmable #CellCulture matrix #DyNAtrix.

By creating a mechanically reconfigurable microenvironment, we can now invert & guide epithelial cell polarity in real time.

#DNAnanotech

1/ 🧵