Right now we’re staring down a perfect storm: large swaths of unvaccinated people, lax masking and social distancing, and dangerous COVID19 variants. Help us fight back. Get vaccinated. Wear your mask.

Had a blast at our annual (outdoor & fully vax’d) SSPB Rice University holiday party tonight. This year, our team’s gingerbread house theme was Merry Twistmas! We hope everyone gets all of the gene fragments on their Twistmas lists this year🎄Biki Kundu Andrea Garza E. Twist Bioscience

So excited to share this work!

Check out the latest episode of EBRC In Translation! Fatima Enam and Kathryn Brink interview Emily Leproust, CEO and co-founder of EBRC member Twist Bioscience about their DNA synthesis platform. Find it here: ebrc.org/InTranslation

I put together an analysis of #riboswitch ligands for Biochemistry. Expected trend: these RNAs sense many #RNAWorld things, and manage other fundamentals. Oddly, riboswitches do not perform #phosphorus management duties, and completely ignore #lipids. doi.org/10.1021/acs.bi…

Chappell and colleagues Rice University use an alternative type I-E CRISPR-Cas system to create a CRISPR activator for bacteria with distinct and expanded regulatory properties, including more frequent periodicity of activation. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac… #CRISPR #activator

Coupling of circuits often results in consumption of the signal, limiting long-term operation. @FrancoLabUCLA, Chappell and colleagues Rice University UCLA propose a new positive-feedback strategy "RNA compensation" to account for this problem. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

Sad to learn that #Yale Prof. and colleague #SidneyAltman, 1989 Chemistry #Nobel recipient, has died. His publication on the #ribozyme action of #RNaseP was a milestone discovery in the now exploding field of #ncRNA. The photo shows him celebrating the news of his Nobel Prize.

Bioscientists have adapted CRISPR—technology which adapts bacterial immune system mechanisms to locate specific genes along DNA—to trigger “silent” genes in bacteria, the key to slowing ongoing crisis of resistance to antibiotics in treatment of disease. bit.ly/3Iux91G

Very excited to share our new preprint where we use a deep learning-based feedback algorithm to control gene expression in real time in thousands of single E. coli cells in parallel. This work was led by Jean-Baptiste Lugagne and @cblassick. 1/

Interested in bacterial peptide sensing? Check out my latest paper! Thanks to all of my amazing co-authors in Tabor Lab lab + beyond: @synthetic_queer Andrew Mu @KGroszman Ky Van Hoang Kevin @bhpogostin John Gunn @jeffrey_j_tabor nature.com/articles/s4158…

Really excited to share our work on engineering ribozymes to sense and respond to cellular RNA signals!

A big congrats to the students in the Chappell Lab, Joff Silberg, and Lauren Stadler labs for showing how to record info about DNA uptake in an undomesticated microbial community using a new form of synthetic memory doi.org/10.1101/2023.0…

Thrilled to share our new preprint on using a new type of microbial memory to track horizontal gene transfer in environmental microbial communities. Amazing collaboration with Chappell Lab and Joff Silberg labs. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… (1/n)