New in #PhilTransB - a theme issue exploring one of science’s deepest questions: how life can emerge from non-living matter. Edited by @ricardsole.bsky.social and colleagues. Read: buff.ly/7iz4tGu

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1936

How dit life originate in our planet? How can we create it in the lab?Our @royalsocietypublishing.org Theme Issue "Origins of Life: the possible and the actual", coedited with @sfiscience.bsky.social C Kempes and Susan Stepney is out! royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202... @manlius.bsky.social

Great collaboration with co-authors Maud Hofmann, Farouk Abdo, and @oborkowski.bsky.social.

Reconstituting alternative life using the test-bed of cell-free systems | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The current form of life on Earth is the outcome of a series of biochemical events that led to the formation of early life with a specific molecular composition encoding its many functions. However, other trajectories of events with widely different ...

Pleased to share that our review on 'Reconstituting alternative life using the test-bed of cell-free systems' is now out in the Phil Trans B special issue on ‘Origins of life: the possible and the actual’. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Four leading researchers on bacterial computing in the @femsmicro.org Workshop on the the topic during the Congress—quite amazing talks by @angelgm.bsky.social, Yolanda Schaerli, Manish Kushwaha & Samgram Bagh. Do bacteria compute? Can we make them to compute wth our logic or do they have their own?

It was a great session!! Thanks for organising it @vdlorenzo.bsky.social @angelgm.bsky.social

#FEMS2025 kicks off in just 2 days 🚀✨

Now is the perfect time to explore the FEMS MICRO app and start building your personalised onsite agenda 📅✅

Flag your favourite sessions ⭐️, identify must-see speakers 🎤, and plan your day 🗺️ to make the most of every moment ⏳

buff.ly/nN0DaPL

Next in Lab's conference agenda: FEMS @femsmicro.org! @vdlorenzo.bsky.social and myself are running a session on bacterial computation. Talks by @yschaerli.bsky.social, @manishmicrobe.bsky.social, Sangram Bagh & organisers. Very looking forward to it! #biocomputation #synbio

Two days of excellent discussions with @ceronifranci.bsky.social and Luca Ciandrini. So great to have them visit.

We are hiring for a funded PhD in design of cross- and multi-species genetic circuits. #PhD #synbio #crossspecies #multispecies #biocomputing #circuits #pathways @inrae-france.bsky.social @parissaclay.bsky.social

Details here: www.cellularcomputing.team/joinus/

On the way back from Abhinav's thesis defense. It's been great to follow this project from start. Congrats to the new doctor, and to his supervisor @manishmicrobe.bsky.social

The main paper from the thesis (so far...) 👇

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

Keep an eye out for the Special Sessions of the European Academy of Microbiology this July at FEMS2025 fems-microbiology.org/eam-sessions... ! Do not miss the one on bacterial computation, featuring top experts @angelgm.bsky.social, Manish Kushwaha, Yolanda Schaerli, and Sangram Bagh!

This is a great review on using nanopores to sequence proteins. Out today.

It covers how nanopores work, why they haven't historically been able to sequence individual proteins, and how researchers are adapting them to solve those problems.

Clear writing throughout.

Experimental evolution of evolvability Evolvability—the capacity to generate adaptive variation—is a trait that can itself evolve through natural selection. However, the idea that mutation can become biased toward adaptive outcomes remains...

Experimental evolution of evolvability | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

European Synthetic Biology Society (EUSynBioS) on LinkedIn: #syntheticbiology #europe #synbio #europe #outreach #communication… 🧬 Are you passionate about #SyntheticBiology, based in #Europe and willing to help our growing community? ⭐️ 𝗝𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗨𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗦…

🚀 Join the #EUSynBioS Steering Committee!

🧬 Passionate about #SyntheticBiology? Based in #Europe? Help grow our community!

We are opening new positions, check them out & apply here 👉 linkedin.com/feed/update/...

#SynBio #ScienceCommunication #Policy

Massive upgrade to our preprint "Reprogramming genetic circuits using space": mathematical modeling, time-based experiments, new functions, more supplementary material... We're thrilled about this work and hope you enjoy it! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Population-level amplification of gene regulation by programmable gene transfer - Nature Chemical Biology Gene regulation in engineered microbial populations is often tuned at individual cell levels. Now, a population-wide amplification system has been devised that expands the dynamic range of plasmid tra...

1/ Hello BlueSky world -- my first post is about a new study from the lab, just published in @nchembio.bsky.social. We demonstrate how population-level gene regulation can be dynamically controlled and amplified using programmable gene transfer.
Link to paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

How can we model the emergent complexity of microbial ecosystems? How do you do the maths & predict their dynamics, from the gut & the soil to the biosphere? Here's a great review paper in @natureecoevo.bsky.social. @vmaull.bsky.social @saramitri.bsky.social
nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks, Alex. There's definitely those challenges with CRISPRi circuits. In our hands a big issue with scaling up seemed to be multiple message delivery. As the number of input signals increased, so did the circuit activation time. Lots more to do, including libraries!

Engineered cell-cell communication via DNA messaging - Journal of Biological Engineering Background Evolution has selected for organisms that benefit from genetically encoded cell-cell communication. Engineers have begun to repurpose elements of natural communication systems to realize pr...

Phages in biological computing have great potential, as was highlighted by @drewendy.bsky.social in doi.org/10.1186/1754.... A recent preprint from the @yschaerli.bsky.social lab also uses inducible phage messages for intercellular communication and CRISPRi. doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Grateful 🙏🙏 for all the feedback received during the different presentations over the past year: SynBio UK 2023, Gogec 2024, BioSynSys 2024, and the SynBYSS seminar series.

This was a multi-year effort by a great team: Abhinav Pujar, Amit Pathania, Corbin Hopper, Amir Pandi, @biocriss.bsky.social, Matthias Függer, Thomas Nowak.

Growth phase and resource competition impacted communication efficiency between senders and receivers. Expanded orthogonality by using DNA messages for i-CRISPRi enabled us to build several multicellular logic gates (single- and dual-rail encoding): NOT, YES, AND, AND-AND-NOT.

Phage-mediated intercellular CRISPRi for biocomputation in bacterial consortia Abstract. Coordinated actions of cells in microbial communities and multicellular organisms enable them to perform complex tasks otherwise difficult for si

Our latest work on Biocomputation in Bacterial Consortia is out in Nucleic Acids Research 😀. In a process we term "intercellular CRISPRi", filamentous phages transmit DNA messages from sender to receiver cells to regulate gene expression by CRISPR interference. doi.org/10.1093/nar/...