Thomas Eng

Alternate routes to acetate tolerance lead to varied isoprenol production from mixed carbon sources in Pseudomonas putida | Applied and Environmental Microbiology Acetate is a relatively abundant component of many lignocellulosic carbon streams and has the potential to be used together with sugars, especially in microbes with versatile catabolism such as P. put...

Vinegar to biofuels: using acetate as a co-carbon source for isoprenol in Pseudomonas putida. Out today in AEM journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

And of course I have to thank our fearless TEA gurus Nawa Baral and @cdscown.bsky.social for their amazing critical analysis on the economics of bioconversion processes.

Are graphical abstracts still too long?! How about a chatbot-generated Haiku?

"Isoprenol's sweet rise
Biosensors guide the way
Fuel for future skies"

There's a new chatbot attached to preprints -- you can ask it questions about the paper here:
sciencecast.org/casts/dy9n40...

Just deposited! New preprint about modular workflows, biosensors for biofuels, and HT screening. Thanks to all my coauthors and @berkeleylab.lbl.gov @biosci.lbl.gov @jgi.doe.gov

I have been delinquent in posting birds lately. I'll try to do better.

For now, two brown pelicans near Santa Barbara. 🪶

This rare, intelligent species of crow is taking flight in Hawaii again Hawaiian crows are extinct in the wild and are found nowhere else on Earth. Now, a small group, safeguarded in captivity, has been released in the forests of Maui.

Hawaiian crows are extinct in the wild and are found nowhere else on Earth. Now, a small group, safeguarded in captivity, has been released in the forests of Maui.

I can’t remember where I read this, but it’s important:

Why is it that when people think about traveling to the past, they worry about doing something small that will drastically change the present, but no one in the present thinks that doing something small today can drastically change the future?

Your lab scissors are actually a parafilmase - a highly specialized enzyme that catalyzes the precise cutting of parafilm through a metal-dependent mechanism

Not even LinkedIn is immune to becoming a dating simulator

Upcycling of polyamides through chemical hydrolysis and engineered Pseudomonas putida - Nature Microbiology Metabolic engineering guided by laboratory evolution enables upcycling of nylon by Pseudomonas putida.

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

Banner for the DOE Office of Science's SCGSR (Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program) and WDTS (Workforce Development for Teachers & Scientists). The background is green with a geometric design. On the left, the SCGSR and WDTS logos are displayed above bold text reading "GROW YOUR RESEARCH. EXPAND YOUR NETWORK." in white and yellow. On the right, a professional portrait of a smiling woman with curly black hair, glasses, and a black blazer is shown.

Fellowship opportunity for grad students:

DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research #SCGSR program now open for applications

JGI @jgi.doe.gov is part of @berkeleylab.lbl.gov and can host students. To discuss possible projects, please reach out to our scientists!

science.osti.gov/wdts/scgsr

We just celebrated the opening of the newest building at @berkeleylab.lbl.gov - BioEPIC! Many thanks to the Smith Group, Clark Construction, and UC National Laboratories for your efforts in making this building a reality!

bioepic.lbl.gov

@ucnewsroom.bsky.social
@eesaberkeleylab.bsky.social

Remember that Europe (@ebi.embl.org) has mirrored all these services and they will keep on running. They look and feel a bit different but do the same thing. I think @ewanbirney.bsky.social should be able to confirm.

www.europepmc.org
www.ebi.ac.uk/jdispatcher/...

A portrait of Daisy Roulland-Dussoix from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Roulland-Dussoix

Do you know Daisy Roulland-Dussoix? She is one of the discoverers of restriction enzymes, who’s findings paved the way for the development of recombinant DNA and cloning technologies. Accordingly, the finding was rewarded with a #NobelPrize. But the prize didn’t go to her.
🧵👇

This is such a huge loss for the meiosis community. Scott provided so much important support when I felt I was yelling into the void about meiotic checkpoints and equity issues. I will miss him 💕

Scene from The Princess Bride where Vizzinni says "You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen"

OpenAI right now

and then she takes it out 1 min ltr 🥲 TikTok video by val

Happy new year! This is not my cat. www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Ye2hdc/

In fairness, “you can make millions of individual molecules but there are 13 that you need but can’t make so let’s outsource their production to plants. Also, it’s actually 12…you can make one of the vitamins…as long as the sun’s rays touch your skin like you yourself are a plant” does sound fake.

Honoring Senator Skinner at the lab today to celebrate her dedication to renewable energy and energy storage

**HALF-STAFF ~ Sunday, December 29, 2024 until sunset, Tuesday, January 28, 2025 ** In honor and tribute to the memory of President James Earl Carter, Jr. - Stars and Stripes DAILY December 29, 2024 Proclamation Announcing the Death of James Earl Carter, Jr. TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES: It is my solemn duty to announce officially the death of James Earl Carter, Jr., the t...

Thank you Jimmy Carter for one last gift to the nation: flags at half-staff today
starsandstripesdaily.org/half-staff-s...

Microbial secondary metabolites: advancements to accelerate discovery towards application Nature Reviews Microbiology - In this Review, Dinglasan and colleagues explore innovations that facilitate rapid microbial secondary metabolite discovery, focusing on recent techniques for the...

Our new review article "Microbial secondary metabolites: advancements to accelerate discovery towards application" in Nature Reviews Microbiology is now published!

rdcu.be/d6BHX

Venn diagram illustrating microbial diversity of bacteria and archaea captured by isolates, metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from NCBI and IMG, and metagenomes from IMG. A large portion of microbial diversity, labeled as 'Microbial Dark Matter,' represents species not captured by isolates or MAGs. Image modified from https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adq2166

Genomes assembled from #metagenomes (a.k.a. MAGs) are awesome and have revolutionized our ability to study uncultivated microbes

...BUT: they still don't capture a lot of the 🦠 species that are out there

New @jgi.doe.gov paper led by Dongying Wu and Natalia Ivanova: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Three Berkeley Lab Scientists Receive PECASE Award Three scientists with Berkeley Lab were among the nearly 400 scientists and engineers awarded by President Biden to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Congratulations to Lab scientists Raúl Briceño, Stefan Wild, and Ahmet Kusoglu for receiving the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor the US government bestows on early-career scientists and engineers. 🧪

More ⬇️
newscenter.lbl.gov/2025/01/16/t...

The proteomics of quiescent and nonquiescent cell differentiation in yeast stationary-phase cultures - PubMed As yeast cultures enter stationary phase in rich, glucose-based medium, differentiation of two major subpopulations of cells, termed quiescent and nonquiescent, is observed. Differences in mRNA abunda...

Amazing tweetorial!! Looking forward to reading this. Interesting you don’t see partitioning of Ec into quiescent vs non-quiescent populations, like budding yeast from Maggie Werner Washburne pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21289090/ ; do the bulk phenotypes require growth in M9 first or would LB suffice?

If the total number of bacteria on earth stays roughly
constant, then on average there must be as much death as there is growth, suggesting at least naively that selection for surviving starvation is as relevant as for growing fast. But we know relatively little about how bacteria change 2/n

MGM-33 Workshop Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 1 Cyclotron Rd Building 91, Room 310 Berkeley, CA 94720 April 28, 2025 - May 2, 2025

Microbial Genomics & Metagenomics Workshop

Want to learn how to use IMG, GOLD, and other @jgi.doe.gov -hosted platforms and tools for microbial and metagenomics?

Register now for the 33rd MGM Workshop in Berkeley

Early bird rates available until Jan 31!

mgm.jgi.doe.gov

This is how phrases become corporate speak like “synergies” and “give you the time back”😅

Yes, we left it a bit vague as we didn’t have a clean answer for this; it might be related to the stirred tank format or the extended nutrient feeding where the overall biomass is considerably increased. Heterologous catabolic pathway with heterologous final product

Addressing genome scale design tradeoffs in Pseudomonas putida for bioconversion of an aromatic carbon source - npj Systems Biology and Applications npj Systems Biology and Applications - Addressing genome scale design tradeoffs in Pseudomonas putida for bioconversion of an aromatic carbon source

Some recent work from our group on evaluating growth coupled cutsets