nature alert! Our recent paper on the 'default states' of the yeast and mouse genomes. Kudos Brendan Camellato Ran Brosh Jef Boeke and the entire Dark Matter Project team!
nature.com/articles/s4158…

nature hat-trick completed!

3 papers this past year from The Dark Matter Project:

nature.com/articles/s4158…
nature.com/articles/s4158…
nature.com/articles/s4158…

Read more on TheDarkMatterProject.org

Jef Boeke Bo Xia Weimin Zhang Brendan Camellato Itai Yanai 💔

The news on our Nature cover article just keep pouring.
This News&Views from Konkel and Casanova is very good!

A mobile DNA sequence could explain tail loss in humans and apes nature.com/articles/d4158…

Mammalian cells repress random DNA that yeast transcribes nature.com/articles/d4158…
Out today: N&V by Sean Eddy on our nature paper!
Brendan Camellato Jef Boeke

CAN YOU READ THIS?
?SIHT DAER UOY NAC
Backwards-written text is hard to read. Turns out that's also true for DNA🧬Check out how Brendan Camellato wrote the 101-kb HPRT1 locus and its reversed version into the genomes of yeast & mice.
nature.com/articles/s4158…

⁦Maureen Barr⁩ and I enjoy a quiet lull before the storm #TAGC24 . Neighboring table informed us that we just missed thousands of screaming kids here for a cheerleading competition. He asked about us; we said we are geneticists, much nerdier with much less eye contact. 🤷‍♂️

#OnThisDay in 1859, Charles Darwin's landmark book 'On the Origin of Species' was first published. The work is one of the foundations of evolutionary biology, and one of the most important scientific works of the 19th century. #HistoryOfScience

Very pleased to see our work is featured in Cell cover this week. Kudos to Ehmad Chehre for illustration, and Daniel Schindler and Roy Walker for injecting ideas. Great team work and glad it finally sees the light.

Out in nature!
Weimin Zhang and the The Dark Matter Project team developed an efficient method to (biallelically) overwrite the mouse genome with any DNA🧬Huge step to mammalian SynBio. Oh, they also made a COVID-19 mouse model🤧
nature.com/articles/s4158…

This is creepy - according to Dall-E2 it's a 'Yeast dressed up as a jack lantern for Halloween. Actually this CREEPY: academic.oup.com/nar/advance-ar…

Congratulations to Yu Jeremy Zhao and all our great coauthors (and thanks Ran Brosh for the yeast/pumpkin hybrid and more...)

Very nice piece on our recent The EMBO Journal paper, also highlighting the awesome work from Matthew Clarke in the Campbell group: embopress.org/doi/full/10.15…

What is 𝐒𝐲𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐬?

It's a new approach to study genome (e.g. transcriptional) regulation using 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 DNA.
In this 𝐌𝐨𝐥 𝐂𝐞𝐥𝐥 paper, we've applied it to study 𝐒𝐨𝐱𝟐: dlvr.it/Sl087w

How does #Sox2 get expressed in ES cells? using a downstream enhancer 100,000 bp away... Check out some remarkable NextGen enhancer bashing by Ran Brosh with help from the amazing team in Matt Maurano's lab and the The Dark Matter Project project... dlvr.it/Sl087w

Congrats to Luciana on her PNAS paper 🎉 Check out how she transplanted yeast's *entire* ribosomal DNA array in one step, put two rDNA arrays in cis, and used HiC and dual-color southern blot to track how the sizes of each rDNA array change (plus more!) pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Our PNASNews paper on chemicals production from CO2 with ebgineered yeast was highlighted in Nature Reviews Bioengineering today nature.com/articles/s4422…

Hey everybody, the Dark Matter project just went social media whole hog!!! The Dark Matter Project and don't forget ... thedarkmatterproject.org

check it out ... synbio for future health ... bit.ly/3Dj2HHp

Recombination
twitter.com/TheFigen_/stat…

It’s never a wasted petri plate 🧫 when growing Penicillium vulpinum (=Penicillium claviforme) in culture! Just look at those glorious matchstick-like synnemata! A miniature forest… I dedicate this to mycologist Tom Volk! RIP you marvelous mycophile! Mycological Society of America

Ross McBee Harris Wang Jef Boeke Extremely proud to finally be able to share the full version of this paper - now out at eLife - the journal! New figures describe the engineering of a 2nd gen mammalian cell line which grows long-term in valine-free conditions at 3.2 days/doubling.
doi.org/10.7554/eLife.…