Kitty Clouston

The Wallace Lab is expanding in 2026, with five new Postdoctoral Research Associate positions now open. If you're passionate about engineering biology for sustainability, we'd love to hear from you! 🧬 ♻️

Deadline: 12th November 2025, details below ⬇️

Hopes of realizing a dream ‘city of health’ Snippets from Nature’s past.

Musings on manifesting a world of sanitary homes and hospitals, and thoughts on an essay that defines rhythm, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive

go.nature.com/49aKFqA

Engineered geminivirus replicons enable rapid in planta directed evolution Directed evolution can rapidly generate genetic variants with new and enhanced properties, yet efficient platforms for performing such evolution directly in plant cells have been lacking. We developed...

Out First Release in @science.org this week:
The development of a directed evolution strategy with proof of concept in plant immune protein engineering.

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

#EngBio ECRs Meetup returns on 20 Oct. Join us to hear great talks from Konstantina Beritza and
Caroline Faessler 🌱
@camplantsci.bsky.social

Sign up here👉 tickettailor.com/events/engin...

#plantsciences #marinemicroalga #Nicotianabenthamiana

Big Doughnutty News.
Just out in Nature: the all-new 2025 Doughnut. Transformed from a single-year snapshot to an annual global monitor of 21st century social & ecological thriving. Available to all in an open-access paper by @andrewlfanning.bsky.social and me. 🧵 1/
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Authorship Integrity Toolkit - UK Research Integrity Office The Authorship Integrity Toolkit Practical resources to support responsible authorship in research UKRIO is pleased to present the Authorship Integrity Toolkit – a new collection of resources to help ...

UKRIO @ukrio.bsky.social is introducing an Authorship Integrity Toolkit:
a set of practical, adaptable resources designed to support both individual researcher contributors in their day-to-day practice and organisations in developing policies and managing projects.
ukrio.org/resources/th...

Improving Rubisco for sustainable crop production at Gatsby Charitable Foundation on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Improving Rubisco for sustainable crop production at Gatsby Charitable Foundation, listed on FindAPhD.com

Another #PhD project available for applications in #photosynthesis with @ecarmosilva.bsky.social @sci-tech-lancaster.bsky.social looking at ways to improve Rubisco. Details below including how the successful nominee will play a direct role in shaping the project proposal tinyurl.com/2a8szv3y

OpenAI is huge in India. Its models are steeped in caste bias. India is OpenAI’s second-largest market, but ChatGPT and Sora reproduce caste stereotypes that harm millions of people.

“The experience [of AI] actually mirrored society.”

Science and the Parliament 2025 - save the date: 19 November 2025

Announcing Science and the Parliament 2025!

Join us at Dynamic Earth to delve into the future of STEM in Scotland, with an exhibition, keynote speeches and more. This year’s theme is environment, climate change and human health.

Registration is open: rsc.li/parliament-event25

#ChemSky

Equity in science is a beautiful lie — and I’m done pretending Science isn’t really moving towards equity; institutions are just perfecting the appearance of equity. We need to build an alternative system.

“Many scholars from historically overexploited countries (often referred to as the global south) expected that exposing the problem would trigger change. Four years on, I see it clearly: the scientific system was never designed for equity,” writes Dolors Armenteras in Nature. #Academicsky 🧪

It’s a new term: here are 99 lab hacks Nature asked contributors, editors and working researchers to share their best advice for scientists.

As the new term begins, here are 99 lab hacks to make your working lives easier

go.nature.com/4pEZ6ZJ

Ian Penman · Infinite Wibble: Brian v. Eno At a time when most conversation about the arts remained stuck in an Oxbridge common room, Eno was a one-man laboratory...

No algorithm or software would ever have come up with the glorious car-smash of the Velvet Underground or Roxy Music. The kind of happenstance alchemy that can never be programmed: a crack in a voice, an offbeat, disturbed air.’

Ian Penman on Brian Eno: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

wake up girlies, new lab website just dropped 🌈 🦠

A biocompatible Lossen rearrangement in Escherichia coli - Nature Chemistry Biocompatible chemistry merges chemo-catalytic reactions with cellular metabolism for sustainable small-molecule synthesis. Now a biocompatible Lossen rearrangement has been demonstrated to control ba...

Ever wondered where your paracetamol comes from? Spoiler: crude oil. In this study – led by Nick Johnson from our lab in collaboration with @astra-zeneca.bsky.social – we show how biology and chemistry can work together to create a more sustainable alternative. (1/n)

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

Sebastian's Biotech Bazaar Designer of fine, hand-crafted, bespoke, and fully open source biotechnology tools for educators and researchers. Plasmids, lab equipment, cell lines, and seeds. An ever-growing collection of high qua...

Excited to announce some new plasmid offerings in my shop at atinygreencell.com! Here's a thread of the current catalog. All proceeds directly support my lab and my continued effort to build useful open-source tools. Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more. Please share! 💚

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Are you a scientist with an interest in photography? We're delighted to announce that the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition is now open for entries until 15 August 2025! 🎉 Find out more: royalsociety.org/journals/pub... #RSPphotocomp

Recombinases your thing? In the latest from my lab, Veronica Greco shows how @nanopore sequencing + automated liquid handling provides the perfect platform for characterising these systems at scale! Awesome collaboration with @jennbrophy.bsky.social @sarah-guiziou.bsky.social doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The nine teams we're funding in Synthetic Plants are paving the way for more productive, resilient, and sustainable plants. 🌱

Discover how they'll deliver growth in agriculture for the UK + beyond: link.aria.org.uk/sp-c-bs

A gatekeeper for gene transfers - Nature Plants Large-scale genetic screening for plastid-to-nucleus gene transfers identifies that fast double-strand break repair functions as a key barrier for nuclear integration of organellar DNA and provides in...

With their clever setup to visualize ongoing endosymbiotic gene transfers (EGTs), Enrique Gonzalez-Duran, Ralph Bock and team reveal how double-strand break repair limits excessive EGT. Check out their new Nature Plants paper and my News and Views summary! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Alternatives to capitalism 6.30pm Mon 16 Jun | Grace Blakeley, Abby Innes | Free event at the LSE Festival: Visions for the Future | Ticket required

First up, opening night: Should we be thinking more radically about the problems with capitalism? Can we imagine an alternative way of organising our societies? with @graceblakeley.substack.com @abbyinnes.bsky.social & Ryan Shorthouse @brightblueuk.bsky.social

Would you like to write for New Scientist? We always work with freelancers, but occasionally I put out a call like this for new writers. I'm looking for 300-700 word news stories about new discoveries. Don't pitch us press releases or the big journals, we have those covered. Pay starts at 51p/word

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations!

These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs.

Save and share the post!

This is a wild paper. The anaerobic biochemistry is definitely worth your while (and beyond me to explain), but let me try to explain why this is also an evolutionary bombshell. This is about how nitrogen fixation evolved as we know it.

Interesting thread 🧵 from @georghochberg.bsky.social dissecting the evolution of nitrogenases from cofactors of methane-producing enzymes. The “molecular paleontology” possible with modern technology is so cool. 🧪🧶🧬

Got any great final year students who love the bench but don't (yet) want to do a PhD? I'm looking for a research technician to join our amazing AVERT team for the last 2 years of the project - a great chance to develop lab skills while supporting our team in York.
jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/rese...

Everything you've ever wanted to know about font selection in R.

The Secret History of Neoliberalism with George Monbiot Independent journalism | News, culture & style | Investigations, analysis, features, ideas, recipes, newsletters & podcasts that make sense of the world

In-person tickets for tomorrow's event are sold out, but you can still watch it online. Need to book though. Looking forward to talking to and with you all. observer.co.uk/our-events/t...

Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651837v1

Introduction of a phenylalanine sink in fast growing cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus PCC 11801 leads to improved PSII efficiency, linear electron transport, and carbon fixation Random mutagenesis of the cyanobacteria Synechococcus elongatus PCC 11801 enabled the extracellular accumulation of high Phe titers. The mutant strain fixed significantly higher rates of carbon dioxi...

Introduction of a phenylalanine sink in fast growing cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus PCC 11801 leads to improved PSII efficiency, linear electron transport, and carbon fixation onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @theplantjournal.bsky.social