A nitrogen-fixing organelle, or “nitroplast,” has been identified in a marine alga. This discovery sheds light on the evolutionary transition from endosymbiont to organelle. Learn more this week in Science: scim.ag/6yX

One big lesson from humanity's history is that pandemics happen all the time. Our ancestors couldn't do much about them, but our situation today is different — and so I think we should learn this history lesson and reduce the risk of pandemics. This chart is from Saloni's

Last week we published a landmark paper in Nature describing the production of the world's leading vaccine adjuvant, QS-21, in yeast. This work will pave the way for affordable, readily available, effective vaccine adjuvants for the world.

RuBisCO is one of the most exciting bioengineering targets, but studying and improving its catalytic abilities can be very challenging. To address this, we came up with an intracellular strategy to monitor and evolve RuBisCO at scale! Check out our new preprint below🪴

The work by Chintan Soni on a Translation-Independent Directed Evolution Strategy to Engineer Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases is finally out! NSF Center for Genetically Encoded Materials pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

Do you really need to spread plasmid libraries on mountains of plates to get uniform growth, or can you just dump them in a flask and call it a day? We make huge plasmid libraries in the de Boer Lab, so we tested whether culture method really matters. 1/ biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

In our newest preprint, • we explore the effects of synonymous genome recoding, and • construct & troubleshoot a synthetic 57-codon E. coli genome using multi-omics, editing, and laboratory evolution. 1/n

Super excited to share that ENGRAM is out today! ENGRAM cells are programmed to write their histories into the genome, recording the intensity, duration, and order of biological events simultaneously. nature.com/articles/s4158…

An Orthogonal T7 Replisome for Continuous Hypermutation and Accelerated Evolution in E. coli biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_synbio

If you asked a room of cell biologists 5 years ago if cell culture media could productively grow cells while costing just $0.63 per liter, you would have been laughed out of it. No longer. Let's dive into this important study that poses challenges for #cultivatedmeat skeptics:

The capability for producing "mirror life" is out there and poses danger. When some scientists who worked on this became aware, they stopped pursuing it, and co-authored this piece, along with over 30 leading scientists—a Science Magazine policy forum that lays out the risks

Sharing here a new commentary in Science Policy Forum that provides new analysis on risks related to the potential future creation of mirror bacteria — synthetic organisms in which all molecules have reversed chirality (i.e. are ‘mirrored’). 1/x science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…