A nice overview in C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) of our paper identifying how yew trees synthesize the cancer drug Taxol: cen.acs.org/biological-che…

Baccatin III is a key precursor for the chemotherapy drug Taxol, and scientists have now figured out how it’s made in yew trees. cen.acs.org/biological-che…

What to agument your favourite protein with new functionalities? We've got a #biodesign workflow to help with that! In work led by Georgie Hau Sørensen we present SIMPLIFE that blends biophyscial and #ML models to extend biology in useful ways. #synbio doi.org/10.1101/2025.0…

Now that they've ported the biosynthetic pathway for taxol into tobacco plants you can finally get cancer and treat cancer at the same time nature.com/articles/s4158…

Great article in today’s Stanford Report on our recent work deciphering how yew trees produce Taxol Sattely_lab sattelylab.bsky.social Jack Chun-Ting Liu news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/0…

Wise words from my friend John Fowler. Gutting funding basic research is a profoundly bad idea. Shocking that this has been flying under the radar and that it well might happen.

My NIDA grant renewal is almost 2 months late and I’m going to have to start firing my students and staff. Not a lot of transformation to be had in my lab.

This week in academia, a not so short🧵... 1. Staff reductions and other cost cutting measures coming to Brown University highereddive.com/news/brown-uni…

Plant Science Research Weekly -- Elucidation and recreation of the biosynthetic pathway for taxol (Nature) Conor McClune (Summary by Mary Williams) plantae.org/elucidation-an… #PlantaePSRW

Pithy coverage of our recent work elucidating and reconstituting how yew trees synthesize Taxol #synbio

It makes sense that skin microbes would have an intimate relationship with our immune cells. But engineering these bugs into topical vaccines still feels like sci-fi. Congrats Djenet Bousbaine!

I am thrilled to announce that I am launching my lab at the Salk Institute in September! The Blum lab will study the physiological effects of plant-derived molecules, with a particular focus on the mammalian immune system.

'The vaccine we all wear' In Science Magazine, Postdoc Djenet Bousbaine writes about her work in Institute Scholar Michael Fischbach lab exploring the possibility of non-invasive topical vaccines that could be applied directly to the skin: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

An in planta single-cell screen to accelerate functional genetics biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #biorxiv_plants

A truly enabling new approach by Tara Lowensohn, Will Cody and Sattely_lab sattelylab.bsky.social to probe plant genetics at scale. Single-gene-per-cell delivery coupled to an effective transcriptional selection system. Libraries in plants. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Cool new story by Colin Kim Colin Y. Kim (current postdoc in my group) from his time as a grad student in Jing-Ke Weng's lab. Great example of combining plant genomics and biochemistry to understand enzyme evolution/neofunctionalization! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Thanks Patrick Collison for highlighting our work!