Gianluca Prezza

Photo: HIRI / Luisa Härtig

The Friends of the @helmholtzhzi.bsky.social have awarded Gianluca Prezza the HZI PhD Award for his outstanding doctoral thesis. In #HIRI's @westermannlab.bsky.social, he investigated #sRNAs in the gut bacterium B. theta. 🦠👨🎓 Congrats, @gprezza.bsky.social!
www.helmholtz-hiri.de/en/newsroom/...

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...

While writing my thesis, I kept wondering why I was putting so much effort in something that "nobody will ever read". Well, someone did and thought it deserved a prize! 🤯
Many thanks to people @westermannlab.bsky.social and Alex in particular for the support, supervision and, eventually, nomination.

Fantastic to see this work published, and the interest it has sparked! A tour de force by Anna Lindell and a interdisciplinary team I was honoured to contribute to.👉 PFAS are already in our environment and bodies, we urgently need ways to mitigate their impact 🧫🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/2

We're hiring for 2 postdocs to work in our lab in London on the newly announced Wellcome Trust SynHG project. If you know people looking to work on big-scale ambitious science like this, please RT and share this with them. Apply by 7/20, interviews in Aug. imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Researchers take first steps to creating synthetic human genomes | Wellcome Scientists are developing technology to create the first synthetic human chromosome. The ability to write large genomes could transform our understanding of health.

It's 25 yrs to the day since the Human Genome Project & Craig Venter declared joint victory in sequencing the human genome - an ideal time for @wellcometrust.bsky.social to annouce their new project, involving our lab, to begin work towards synthesising human genomes. wellcome.org/news/researc...

Excited to share my PhD work!
We used a low-input RNA-seq protocol to dig into what drives cell shape differences in Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron.
Congrats and big thanks to all co-authors 🧫🧬.

Bacteroides Theta-Iota-Omicron is polymorphic already in its name. What are the differences between the morphotypes? We tried to answer this with a combination of mechanical separation of cells based on their shape and an ultra-low input RNA-seq protocol. Paper from @elisebor.bsky.social here 👇

Did you think you needed a promoter for CRISPRa? Think again!

A screenshot of the termination notice showing "Outstanding Investigator Grants"

A screenshot of the termination notice with "This award is terminated effective the date of this award, due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students." highlighted

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a microrobotics platform | PNAS Engineering small autonomous agents capable of operating in the microscale environment remains a key challenge, with current systems still evolving...

“Hello World”

written with living flies 🪰

🧪
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

I'm sorry what 🤯

Awesome, congratulations Eloi!

Here is the Bonsai visualization of a realistic dataset. In contrast to UMAP or PCA, the Bonsai tree accurately reflects the structure in the data. Not only visually, but the
correlations between the true distances and distances in the Bonsai representation are close to 1 for almost all cells.

Engineered orthogonal and obligate bacterial commensalism mediated by a non-standard amino acid Nature Microbiology - A genetically engineered microbial symbiosis based on synthetic auxotrophy is created, with potential implications as a biocontainment strategy.

It seems there are no free-living organisms known to rely exclusively on one other organism for their survival

Until perhaps now

Check out our latest publication in @natmicrobiol.nature.com to see how we designed an exclusive microbial reliance using GCE

rdcu.be/ekepI
1/2

Engineering intercellular communication using M13 phagemid and CRISPR-based gene regulation for multicellular computing in Escherichia coli Nature Communications - Engineering multicellular consortia, where information processing is distributed across specialized cell types, offers a promising strategy for implementing sophisticated...

Very happy to share our newly published work! We engineered phages for intercellular communication in multicellular consortia and integrated it with CRISPR-based gene regulation for biocomputing. Congratulations to @astrikusuma.bsky.social @dmf-unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social
rdcu.be/ehORO

Engineered bacteria that self-assemble bioglass polysilicate coatings display enhanced light focusing | PNAS Cutting-edge photonic devices frequently rely on microparticle components to focus and manipulate light. Conventional methods used to produce these...

PRETTY AWESOME

Sidor et al. PNAS take a single enzyme from a marine sponge and express it in E. coli, conferring the ability to self-assemble bioglass from silica precursors present in ocean water

End result? Living, light-focusing microlenses that persist for months

Cheap, durable photonics

Transcriptomic profiling of individual bacteria by MATQ-seq - Nature Protocols Bacterial single-cell sequencing via MATQ-seq combines index sorting, random priming and rRNA depletion, and offers high cell retention and transcript capture rates, making it ideal for experiments wi...

If you want to do single-cell RNA-seq on your favourite bacterium, here‘s our detailed Nature Protocol for microbial MATQ-seq. It profiles up to 600 genes in a single bacterial cell!

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

Timescales in Cell Biology

LIDAR is out! rdcu.be/efugD We are one baby step closer to making it useful for therapeutics. NIH high-risk high-reward program provides key support.

This is figure 1, which shows colors in nature.

A Review in Nature Reviews Bioengineering discusses the recreation of bioinspired colouration and dynamic colour change mechanisms for applications in optics, sensors and biomedicine. https://go.nature.com/3Y3wYmQ 🔒

who doesn't enjoy some beautiful FtsZ rings on a sunday evening? these from 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘶𝘴, from all angles, by the @jwveening.bsky.social, posted earlier on 𝕏, on may 6, 2021

Movie S2 from journals.plos.org/plospathogen...
#MicroSky

Expanding the Bacteroides synthetic biology toolkit to develop an in vivo intestinal malabsorption biosensor. The human gut is a highly dynamic physical environment where perturbations - including factors such as acidification, oxygenation, and particle concentration (osmolality) - can influence microbiota co...

Sharing exciting work led by PhD students McCallum and Burckhardt! We created a new series of syn bio tools in Bacteroides to create non-invasive, real time and sensitive in vivo gut biosensors. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Love me some RNA-seq based biosensor development. Wonderful work!

So very grateful and proud to have been a part of this paper, and now this cover! @proftomellis.bsky.social

Had a lot of fun at our 2nd in-person meeting for Sustainable Style UKRI Engineering Biology Mission Award with Northumbria University collaborators and Colorifix coming to Imperial before we all headed to Modern Synthesis to see bacterial cellulose being made into exciting textiles.

First post with exciting news!
If you need to design gram-positive bacteria, our comprehensive genetic toolkit, SubtiToolkit (STK), can be really useful! Check out our recent study in @cp-trendsbiotech.bsky.social. STK coming soon to @addgene.bsky.social! #SynBio #Biotech
👇
doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

The Eligo team did it again! We just shared on biorxiv the work we did towards the development of a CRISPR-Cas therapy targeting Shiga Toxin producing E. coli (STEC). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

TIGR might have some advantages over CRISPR in genome editing (absolutely tiny, no PAM), but more importantly it's just some really neat, mysterious biology. Maybe TIGR is used by phages to fight other viruses? We don't know yet! Many many many questions left.

Major breakthrough by the Bumann lab @biozentrum.unibas.ch: Antibiotic killing of starved Salmonella is uniformly slow. Usually reported "biphasic killing" with highly resilient persisters is an artifact of CFU readouts because plating on high nutrients kills many previously drug-exposed cells. 😳🧨👇🏼