Genomics and proteomics product manager.

Joined January 2015
50 Photos and videos
Justin Blethrow retweeted
Welcome to the era of lightning-fast metagenomics. 🦖 Get a complete genomic picture of your microbial community, starting at $90/sample. Find out: 👤 Who's there High-resolution taxonomic profiling across all three domains of life 💪 What they're doing Explore the metabolic pathways encoded in your community 👀 What you've been missing See the full picture instead of isolating one microbe at a time Start sequencing today: plasmidsaurus.com/microbiome…
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I was super excited to try Fable 5 today on some bioinformatics projects. Unfortunately the conceptual filtering on 'biology' is so severe I can't even look at cell line specific SNPs, alternative 3' exons, or myco contamination without triggering the safety filters.
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
Thank you for an amazing ASM Microbe 2026! 🦠 The turnout was incredible, with lines stretching across the entire booth block and conversations spanning everything from pathogen genomics to microbiome research. Scientists are using sequencing to answer some of microbiology’s biggest questions. We were excited to see so much interest in our Shotgun Metagenomics service and its potential applications in your research 🤓 Thanks to everyone who stopped by to talk science, share your dino artwork, and connect with our team 🦖 If you weren't able to join us at ASM Microbe this year, here's a quick video recap of some of our favorite moments.
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Kicking off a job to genotype myco species in 16000 contaminated customer samples...
At @plasmidsaurus, we discovered our $50, 3 day TAT RNA-seq service can also detect mycoplasma contamination from several prominent species, and we've already alerted over a hundred labs to likely contamination. We're working on adding this to the service for free very soon.
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At @plasmidsaurus, we discovered our $50, 3 day TAT RNA-seq service can also detect mycoplasma contamination from several prominent species, and we've already alerted over a hundred labs to likely contamination. We're working on adding this to the service for free very soon.
Your cell line sequencing data isn’t mapping well? Before blaming the aligner—check if you're sequencing bacteria instead of human. Let’s talk about mycoplasma contamination.
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
My first podcast is out today with @markwbudde, CEO of @plasmidsaurus. Plasmidsaurus took whole-plasmid sequencing from $600 to $15 and turned a "boring" service company idea into a hugely successful company that now serves >70,000 scientists. We talked about what it means to build a "boring" company, whether the Plasmidsaurus idea could apply to other technologies (like CRISPR screens), and why Plasmidsaurus isn't expanding into China. This podcast is made possible by @AsteraInstitute. 00:00 – Enter Plasmidsaurus 01:21 – Reducing sequencing costs by 40x 04:17 – Scaling Oxford Nanopore technology 06:29 – Venture capital and building a "boring" company 13:03 – Plasmidsaurus vs. traditional CROs 22:25 – On selling customer data 30:10 – Building a moat 37:08 – 50-minute results 39:26 – Logistics and the UPS partnership 48:42 – The Chinese market 50:20 – Playbook for new biotech founders 52:31 – The future of biological reasoning and AI You can find the podcast, THE NEW BIOLOGY, on YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere else.
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
DYK: Plasmidsaurus RNA-Seq gives you answers you can explore 🔍 One especially nifty feature: In the interactive results dashboard, you can normalize gene expression to a control (or any sample) and instantly visualize log fold changes across genes and pathways. • Spot up/down-regulated genes in seconds • Compare conditions without wrestling spreadsheets • Go from raw reads to biological insight fast No R. No Python. No bioinformatics spelunking 🕳️ Just point, click, and uncover what your genes have been hiding 🦖
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
🦖 Plasmidsaurus is heading to #AACR2026! Come find us at Booth #4945 to: 🧬 Learn how Plasmidsaurus can power your cancer research, from unveiling gene expression patterns to validating tools like CRISPR constructs and tumor suppressor plasmids 🤝 Meet our founders 👕 Grab some exclusive merch 🎨 Join our dino drawing tradition See you in San Diego 👋
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
What’s cooler than being cool? No dry ice. We’ve teamed up with Genovis to develop SEQguard™ Dino Preserve, a thermostable RNA protection solution for Plasmidsaurus RNA-Seq. Now you can ship purified RNA at room temp. No ice. No stress. Just fast, reliable RNA-seq. Read more plasmidsaurus.com/news/skip-…
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
Still screenshotting your RNA-Seq plots for slides? 👀 Small update, big quality-of-life upgrade. 🧬 Export your RNA-Seq analysis exactly how you need it:  • SVGs for publication-ready figures  • Clean visuals for lab meeting slides  • Raw data downloads straight from plots Available now in your analysis!
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
Received RNA-seq data from @plasmidsaurus in ~2 days (not including time to ship purified RNA samples). Let's go!!
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
Just received results from @plasmidsaurus RNA-seq. Three business days, comprehensive QC reports, a simple, normalized gene expression matrix, and an ultra intuitive UI to visually explore DEGs. $50/sample. This is the future of bulk transcriptomics!
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
30 Nov 2025
Can't properly describe what was going on in our lab when we realized that @plasmidsaurus has 2 BD turnaround time for RNA-seq. Biotech is forever changed now. (Their fastest competitor is at 1 month...)
This is how life feels when the only goal is to experience the beautiful miracle of being able to use @LatchBio’s integrated analysis pipeline on data generated by @plasmidsaurus 24-hour turnaround time RNAseq service for samples made by a CRO in China for $2
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
We’ve seen some impressive plasmids in our time… but this one might take the cake (and the dropbox)! Huge shoutout to Karine from the Pepin Lab at MGH for this legendary Halloween costume - a dino delivering a T-rex-sized plasmid that defies the laws of molecular biology! 🦖
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
Ladies if you go to his apartment and his fridge is full of sequencing primers for his plasmid collection you DO NOT date him you deserve a man who does whole plasmid sequencing
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
Okay time to dig in my freezer and find my 16s primers. Gonna send amplicons out to @plasmidsaurus to see if the colonies that grew on LB are our E. flagellatus tritonivores or some other critter. Grew nicely overnight in LB broth (miller mod).
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
No luck finding them so gonna order a fresh set. Here are the primers I use, 5'->3': 16s-27F AGAGTTTGATCCTGGCTCAG 16s-338R TGCTGCCTCCCGTAGGAGT 16s-1392R GGTTACCTTGTTACGACTT 16s-longRG-FCCGAATTCGTCGACAACAGAGTTTGATCCTGGCTCAG 16s-longRG-R CCCGGGATCCAAGCTTACGGCTACCTTGTTACGACTT
Okay time to dig in my freezer and find my 16s primers. Gonna send amplicons out to @plasmidsaurus to see if the colonies that grew on LB are our E. flagellatus tritonivores or some other critter. Grew nicely overnight in LB broth (miller mod).
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
RESULTS!!! Okay so got 12k reads (bug seems very hard to crack) but the kind folks at @plasmidsaurus.bsky.social offered to rerun. In the meantime, I'm getting some very strong blast hits for a recently discovered species, Edaphobacter flagellatus. FASTQ: drive.google.com/drive/folde…

In the spirit of #BlueSoup and my friend Elinne, I am sequencing the Triton X-100 contaminant. Stay tuned! Big thanks to @johnowhitaker for bankrolling the plasmidsaurus run. All data will be made public and strain sharable. Yay, community science!
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Justin Blethrow retweeted
So excited to see who this soapieboi is!!!
In the spirit of #BlueSoup and my friend Elinne, I am sequencing the Triton X-100 contaminant. Stay tuned! Big thanks to @johnowhitaker for bankrolling the plasmidsaurus run. All data will be made public and strain sharable. Yay, community science!
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