Benjamin Swedlund

NIH wants to hear from you. No really.

Request for Information on Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

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Engineering yeast multicellular behaviors via synthetic adhesion and contact signaling By designing synthetic toolkits for contact-based signaling (MARS) and cell-cell adhesion (SATURN), we program yeast to form multicellular structures and perform complex tasks, like building logic cir...

Online now @ Cell is the yeast multicellular engineering paper from Fankang Meng - the fruits of his productive PhD in our group. He developed modular synthetic biology tools to bring multicellular behaviours to yeast - specific adhesion, juxtacrine signalling and more. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Exciting Research Professorship Position in Stem Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Leuven. Amazing research ecosystem, great colleagues, high quality of life, tenure track. For those interested in joining us, please see below:
www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

A notecard with the words 'HAVE YOUR SAY...'

Enter our essay competition and win £250. Share with us your ideas on how to innovate event organisation to have a lower environmental impact. Find out how to enter at biologists.com/stories/essa...

🥁 Job opening for a junior group leader at our center in amazing Copenhagen! 🇩🇰🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈Do not hesitate to apply if you want to develop your new lines of research on stem cells! 💡🧫💻🔬🌎

From the Editors-in-Chief of all @biologists.bsky.social's journals: "In these uncertain times, we must strengthen our international scientific networks. We must build new bridges of collaboration. We must speak with a unified voice in support of evidence-based policymaking and scientific freedom."

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

PhD program IFP Energies nouvelles, a French public research and innovation organisation, offers PhD positions in a wide range of scientific disciplines (chemistry, biotechnology, applied mathematics, economics, ...

Most EU organisations post on euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/funding... as well as findaphd.com

Thank you for submitting your Letter of Intent (LOI) to CZI. We appreciate your interest in our work. CZI has decided not to continue with the second round of its Science Diversity Leadership Awards. We are committed to supporting groundbreaking research that advances the frontiers of scientific knowledge in pursuit of our mission to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century. We will provide information on future funding opportunities. We look forward to staying in touch. Bil Clemons, Program Officer, CZI

Pretty sad. Just got the email that CZI is canceling the second round of Diversity Leadership Awards. Private industry will definitely not fill the hole that NIH and NSF are leaving. 😢💔

The most memorable science travel of my PhD - strongly recommend applying! Great science in a beautiful setting

My feed is overwhelmed with scientists right now calling out the catastrophic consequences of the NIH indirect cost order from last night. If those same people aren't also speaking out against the anti-trans, anti-DEI, anti-immigrant orders...we are lost. The only path forward is solidarity.

The scientific publishing landscape is evolving, arguably for the better, promoting more open access, transparency, and objectivity - bibliographic databases should follow suit and be open to promoting this evolution and exploration of different ways to publish science

Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering Scientists and engineers often spend days choosing a problem and years solving it. This imbalance limits impact. Here, we offer a framework for problem choice: prompts for ideation, guidelines for evaluating impact and likelihood of success, the importance of fixing one parameter at a time, and opportunities afforded by failure.

On the same theme: Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Choosing a mentor is arguably one of the most important decisions of any PhD/postdoc, regardless of whether they want to stay in academia or move to industry. My two cents when going through this process: you never ask too many questions (to everyone you can, not just your prospective mentors)

Agree 100%! This should become the norm or even a requirement from funding agencies. Everyone from students to PIs have to gain by sharing their work months to years before final publication. And it gives us the chance to judge the work before introducing the bias of journal names and impact factor!

Delighted to share our last preprint!!! 🎉🎉🎉
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.11.627621v1

We share the first synthetic gene circuit guiding the self-organization of mammalian tissues in elongating structures by dynamically tuning growth, viscosity and adhesion.

Agree 100%! Especially as trainees, there are so many unpredictable factors when choosing a lab, a mentor, and a project. We are particularily vulnerable to luck as our time in the lab is limited, so our ability to hedge our bets by having several projects running in parallel is limited.

Synthetic gene circuits drive disease-fighting T cells Immune cells can be programmed to deliver targeted therapies in models of brain and inflammatory disease

+ much effort into adapting these systems for immunotherapy - see 2 new papers from Wendell Lim's lab, where they engineer cells to (1) target the central nervous system to execute therapeutic functions there, or (2) confer immunosuppressive functions to CD4+ T-cells to tackle auto-immune disorders.

From the Roybal and Baker labs, intramembrane proteolytic receptors 2.0 (after synNotch and SNIPRs 1.0), enabling soluble ligand recognition. Comes with extensive mechanistic insights, an expanded synBio toolbox and in vivo proof-of-concept for tumour clearance by controlling CAR-T activity!

From Alice Ting's lab, synthetic GPCRs (PAGERs) act as an "and-gate”: antigen binding to a nanobody displaces an inhibitory peptide, enabling small-molecule-driven activation. Very modular, can recognise MANY endogenous or synthetic ligands, membrane-tethered or soluble. Design guidelines included!

What a final for 2024 for mammalian synBio! Two groundbreaking papers develop new synthetic receptors to detect synthetic or natural soluble ligands & respond in various user-defined ways. Both dive deep into how their system works and provide many examples of applications. Let’s take a peek:

Please share!

Here is a starter pack dedicated to Mammalian SynBio!

It is still incomplete so if you would like to be added/removed please let me know!

go.bsky.app/SsxHKoV

Applications open for a new cohort of @dev-journal.bsky.social *Pathway to Independence* fellows

Know a #devbio post-doc about to enter the academic job market?

Would they benefit from a little support & mentoring?

Spread the word

Deadline 31 Jan 2025

journals.biologists.com/dev/pages/pi...

Please check out this upcoming Gordon Conference (GRC) on Developmental Biology - March 2025

Very diverse and relevant topics! and Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) accompanying it as well ! (speaker list in commentts)
www.grc.org/developmenta...

Check out our lab's latest publication - cells that make waves! We also tell a cautionary tale for those trying to engineer tissues with synthetic gene circuits: tissue physics, such as cellular crowding, may affect circuit behaviour #NotInTheGenes. See Jos's summary for details. More to come soon!

On to Part 2 of the Synthetic Biology (SynBio) starter pack.

Part 1: bsky.app/starter-pack...
Part 2: bsky.app/starter-pack...

Reply or DM to add/nominate.

Control of spatio-temporal patterning via cell growth in a multicellular synthetic gene circuit - Nature Communications A major goal in synthetic development is to build gene regulatory circuits that control patterning. Here the authors discover that elevated cell density dampens SynNotch signaling, enabling the design...

I am thrilled to share that our work is finally published in Nature Communications!!! 🎉 🎉 🎉

I had the honor of leading the project to its finish line during my last years at USC, building on the groundbreaking work of my co-first authors Pranav Bhamidipati and Marco Santorelli.

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