Diamond Lab

illustration of a petri dishes

📣🦠 New preprint: @savagecatsonly.bsky.social has got you covered with a new approach to building bacterial deletion libraries with unprecedented speed and ease: ow.ly/ltja50WSjBu

How microdosing GLP-1 drugs became a longevity ‘craze’ Internet companies are helping stoke enthusiasm for “microdosing” weight-loss drugs for wellness, mood and joint pain.

Telehealth companies increasingly are marketing “microdoses” of GLP-1 drugs — despite how there is virtually no evidence that smaller-than-standard doses are safe or effective.

illustrations of scientists manipulating DNA in a seed in a steam punk style

Self-cloning crops could transform agriculture – thanks to research from IGI's Venkatesan Sundaresan, who was awarded the 2024 Wolf Prize for his research on apomixis. Read more in this feature from @nature.com: ow.ly/Q7v350WQyne

Model cyanobacterial consortia reveal a consistent core microbiome independent of inoculation source or cyanobacterial host species Abstract. Cyanobacteria are integral to biogeochemical cycles, influence climate processes, and hold promise for commercial applications. In natural habita

Our paper on model cyanobacterial communities by @andrejakust.bsky.social is finally typeset and looks beautiful, check it out:

academic.oup.com/ismej/articl...

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Out now – our reader-friendly 2025 overview of #CRISPR clinical trials! Learn about how CRISPR is being used to treat #HeartDisease, #cancer, #lupus, #RareDiseases, and more! Read here: ow.ly/mRPl50WneTS 🧬

Pam Ronald smiling

Congrats to IGI's @pcronald.bsky.social on receiving the President’s Award for the Advancement of the Common Good from Stanford University! 🎉 Read more: news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Scientists hack microbes to identify environmental sources of methane - Berkeley News UC Berkeley researchers tweaked a key enzyme involved in microbial methane production to understand the unique fingerprints of different environments on Earth that generate the greenhouse gas.

UC Berkeley researchers tweaked a key enzyme involved in microbial methane production to understand the different environments on Earth that generate the greenhouse gas. news.berkeley.edu/2025/08/14/s...

illustration of phage infecting and lysing a bacterium

Did you know that the illustrations in our resources like CRISPRpedia and our illustrated scientific glossary are free to use for non-commercial, educational purposes? Tag us to show us how you're using them! innovativegenomics.org/science-x-art/

‼️Diamond Lab is considering potential a new postdoctoral researcher. If you have strong interests in microbiomes, metagenomics, machine learning, or rumen biology drop us a line and shoot us a CV!

We Love it!! And in our colors too

Love these!!! Now let’s see some communities in watercolor

Think about all the amazing chemotropic microbes that must support this system!!! I hope they took samples

Science x Art Science x Art - Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)

Did you know that the illustrations in our resources like CRISPRpedia are free to use for non-commercial, educational purposes? Check out our Science x Art page to see a selection of work from our designers & artists. Tag us to show us how you're using them! innovativegenomics.org/science-x-art/ 🧬🎨

Strategies for zygotic gene expression during plasmid establishment Conjugative plasmids are key drivers of horizontal gene transfer and the spread of antimicrobial resistance. Their successful establishment in new hos…

Rally nice review on plasmid leading strand anti defense and establishment @bursteinlab.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Precise virulence inactivation using a CRISPR-associated transposase for combating Enterobacteriaceae gut pathogens - Nature Biomedical Engineering A self-transmissible CRISPR-associated transposase system encodes a nanobody payload to treat Shiga toxin infections.

The Ronda lab's newest publication on targeted editing: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

IGI Investigator Carlotta Ronda's New Tool for Precision Microbiome Editing IGI Investigator Carlotta Ronda's New Tool for Precision Microbiome Editing - Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)

Out now in Nature Biomedical Engineering from IGI's Carlotta Ronda @rondalab.bsky.social — a novel way to precisely edit the genomes of microbes in the microbiome to defeat harmful infections. Read more: ow.ly/efsS50WsVen

CRISPR researchers and startup entrepreneurs will share new building in UC Berkeley's Innovation Zone - Berkeley News A planned addition to the campus's Innovation Zone will expand lab space for the Innovative Genomics Institute and build out the largest innovation hub — Bakar Labs — at any U.S. university.

We’re thrilled to announce IGI–Bakar Labs. This new building will allow the IGI to continue expanding our impact in health and agricultural applications of #CRISPR, and will be shared with the Bakar Labs incubator for growing biotech companies. Learn more: news.berkeley.edu/2025/07/17/c...

CRISPR Researchers and Startup Entrepreneurs Will Share New Building in UC Berkeley's Innovation Zone CRISPR Researchers and Startup Entrepreneurs Will Share New Building in UC Berkeley's Innovation Zone - Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)

Very excited to now share publicly that @innovativegenomics.bsky.social will be expanding to an amazing new building in the 2028 - 2029 academic year! innovativegenomics.org/news/igi-bak...

Our friends @thehesslab.bsky.social are actively looking for postdoctoral researchers interested in anerobic microbiology, and studying the rumen microbiome. #microbiologists #bioinformatics #microbiomes

Check out their website: hesslab.com

Thank you for the kind words! We agree there is still significant work to be done in this area, and many more model communities to potentially test. If it is any consolation we did choose PCC7120 as it is both in the genus Nostoc (NCBI taxonomy) and a genetic model for studying heterocyst formation.

The $20 Million Bet on CRISPR to Cure Rare Childhood Diseases The center will bring custom gene-editing treatments to children.

Out now in TIME — @jenniferdoudna.bsky.social on IGI's new initiative, teaming up with the @chanzuckerberg.bsky.social to create a new center for pediatric #CRISPR cures! Read here: ow.ly/E5un50WnbCi

graph of progress of various clinical, described in text at the link

Hot off the presses: our reader-friendly 2025 overview of #CRISPR clinical trials! 🧬 Check it out here: ow.ly/mRPl50WneTS

Click on the post for more info about the paper!!!

CRISPRi-ART enables functional genomics of diverse bacteriophages using RNA-binding dCas13d - Nature Microbiology Leveraging RNA-targeting dCas13d enables selective interference with phage protein translation and facilitates measurement of phage gene fitness at a transcriptome-wide scale.

Dive into our lab’s first peer-reviewed publication—co-led with our friends @benadler.bsky.social and Muntathar Al-Shimary from the @doudna lab! If you’ve already read the preprint, don’t miss the new updates: doi.org/10.1038/s415... @naturemicrobiol.bsky.social

🚨 Fresh from the press! We created and analyzed over 100 in vitro cyanobacterial consortia using well-characterized model cyanobacterial hosts to better understand how cyanobacteria recruit and interact with their microbiomes.

Check it out: doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Nostoc cyanobacteria by My Microscopic World

Out now from @diamondlab.bsky.social — stable microbiome communities using tractable cyanobacteria. An important development for folks working on cyanobacteria, microbial community formation and establishment in lab settings, and microbial community ecology! Read here: tinyurl.com/3cs2x6r7

🥳🥳 Our work exploring the core microbiomes of stable cyanobacterial communities is now out in the @isme-microbes.bsky.social Journal!!! Excellent work by @andrejakust.bsky.social and company!

#microbiology #cyanobacteria #metagenomics

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.

Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world, @billmckibben.bsky.social writes.

We’re happy to share our preprint where applied phages to Microbiomes to test microbial interaction hypotheses - without losing the relevance of the community.

Bonus: using SNPs we studied how our targeted organism recovers from infection, and find how the community likely influences this process.

Unicore Enables Scalable and Accurate Phylogenetic Reconstruction with Structural Core Genes Abstract. The analysis of single-copy core genes, common to most members of a clade, is important for key tasks in biology including phylogenetic reconstru

Also if you want to construct phylogenetic trees across the tree of life, also brought to you by the FoldSeek team...Unicore

doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...