Congrats to Walden Li for defending his PhD thesis on a new class of Type IV ComRS system in oral streptococci!

Just published: OligoRL uses reinforcement learning to 1.) design barcode pools without restriction sites, 2.) find degenerate 16s rRNA primers, and 3.) create Not-So-Random primers for scRNA-seq libraries. All with one algorithm! academic.oup.com/bioinformatics…

There's always room for improvement: Our new paper optimizes a multifactorial protocol using only 17 experiments. Lower cost, fewer reagents, and better results!

Congratulations to Benjamin David, Ph.D. candidate (University of Michigan), for being awarded the 2022 SLAS Graduate Education Fellowship Grant! Read more about David and his research: slas.org/news-highlight….

Thanks to SLAS for supporting Ben's research on sequential transcriptomics. Illinois BIOE U-M BME

Congrats to Ryan Wyllie for defending his PhD thesis: "Strategies for the genetic characterization of the oral streptococci".

Great article about Illinois BIOE and U-M BME grad student Ben David using AI to guide RNA-seq experiments

Ben's paper on an optimized rRNA depletion assay is published in SLAS Technology: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… It's our first paper with SLAS since the society's journals moved to #OpenAccess.

Interested in doing a PhD? Thinking about Biomedical Engineering? Come join us for our PhD Application Workshop! Use the QR code to register.

Oral streptococci have multiple ComRS systems! Our new paper (led by Jinbei Li) dissects ComRS paralogs in seven species. Some separate competence and bacteriocin production, but S. mutans has a second ComRS system that activates competence via crosstalk. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Crosstalk between paralogous ComRS quorum-sensing systems diversifies the competence/bacteriocin networks of oral streptococci biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_micrbio

Congrats to Brendan Brasch for completing his Masters thesis on "Improving constraint-based metabolic models with deep learning". Illinois BIOE

Check this out 🤩: BacterAI maps microbial metabolism without prior knowledge 💻 Jensen Lab nature.com/articles/s4156…

NEW: “AI could run a million microbial experiments per year” by Jim Lynch Automation uncovers combinations of amino acids that feed two bacterial species and could tell us much more about the 90% of bacteria that humans have hardly studied.] [article] news.engin.umich.edu/2023/05/ai-cou…

Meet BacterAI, an AI system that uses laboratory robots to perform autonomous experiments. BacterAI can study microbial metabolism without human knowledge. Congrats to Adam, Kevin, Danielle, Annamarie, Noah, and Kenan on our new paper. nature.com/articles/s4156…

Valeri, Krishnan, and Collins wrote a great analysis of our BacterAI article for Nature Microbiology. nature.com/articles/s4156… rdcu.be/ddJvv

U-M's Paul Jensen, Assistant Professor, BME and ChE, recently received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant for his study, “Learning mechanistic models with automated experiments.” Read more: bme.umich.edu/paul-jensen-re… Michigan Engineering Michigan Chemical Engineering University of Michigan Medical School

The mutacins are controlled by their own quorum sensing system! Streptococcus mutans has multiple "MutRS" pathways that show inter- and intra-strain crosstalk. Our paper also analyzes the relationships between 483 MutRS, ComRS, and Rgg-Shp systems.