Co-founder at Pioneer Labs, SAB at Tenza, Molecular Biology. I edit microbial genomes and take lots of notes. All views my own, He/Him.
Joined June 2019
- Tweets 276
- Following 409
- Followers 704
- Likes 944
19 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
Jun 5
13 years ago, I read a paper that changed how I think about science. No new experiments, just decades of scattered findings reasoned into one answer to "why are bacteria different from eukaryotes?"
My breakdown of Julie Theriot's masterclass: devonstork.com/p/a-demonstra…
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Jun 11
To engineer microbes for Mars, we needed to figure out exactly what chemistry they’d need to handle. So we talked to all the NASA people and read all the rover papers to figure out the recipe.
This is science’s best guess for what Mars dirt water is, and we grew stuff in it!
Jun 11
How do we simulate Mars here on Earth?
We scrutinized Mars rover data so you don’t have to. 😛
Here’s what it tells us about how to simulate Mars on Earth, and which organisms could grow on Mars!
📄 Report: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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Jun 10
I thought people were joking about how aggressive the Fable safety filter is and manipulating context to make it seem worse than it is. But damn, I was wrong. My work account gets flagged on every single prompt. My personal one doesn't, but that's mostly for writing, not science.
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Jun 5
Every time there's a Claude outage, I wonder if it's because the recursive bootstrapping has begun and all of the compute is going to make the AGI instead of summarizing papers for me.
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Devon Stork retweeted
Plz stop asking me how to restart Mars’s magnetic field we DONT NEED IT
Jun 4
Terraforming Mars is a hard problem. You need to warm the entire planet by tens of degrees and make enough oxygen for humans to breathe. But you don’t need to create a magnetic field to live outside on a terraformed Mars.
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Devon Stork retweeted
Jun 4
Terraforming Mars is a hard problem. You need to warm the entire planet by tens of degrees and make enough oxygen for humans to breathe. But you don’t need to create a magnetic field to live outside on a terraformed Mars.
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Devon Stork retweeted
I think the first successful virtual cells are going to model prokaryotes, not eukaryotes.
It’s technologies like BioBloom that are going to be the difference between being able to collect enough data and NOT.
Thoughts? @ChanZuckerberg @DBBurkhardt @arcinstitute @joncalles
May 5
This tube is a library of bacteria with every single-base-pair genome mutation, all DNA-barcoded.🧪Growth barcode sequencing = data on millions of mutations.
📄 Report: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Retweet if you want more data, and read on if you want to use the library! 🧵
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May 5
When you evolve bacteria, you get a random smattering of mutations.
Now, you can measure fitness for every possible SNP mutation in the genome with a single experiment!
BioBloom Libraries available on Addgene now! 🧪👇
May 5
This tube is a library of bacteria with every single-base-pair genome mutation, all DNA-barcoded.🧪Growth barcode sequencing = data on millions of mutations.
📄 Report: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Retweet if you want more data, and read on if you want to use the library! 🧵
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Apr 9
Automation software is not written in normal languages, and you lose a lot of features because of that! There's really no reason for it either, other than vendors being able to lock you in. So we use @pylabrobot.
Apr 9
Most lab automation software is proprietary, expensive, and painful for anybody who codes, so we ditched it. Our liquid handler runs on Python PyLabRobot, and we're sharing our protocols open-source.
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Devon Stork retweeted
Apr 1
We spent months thinking about atmosphere models and climate calculations for a habitable Mars. We did not, until now, consider the maximum acceptable arthropod dimensions. 🦟
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Jan 21
Cory taught me a lot back in grad school, and it was great to catch up and discuss what we're doing at Pioneer!
Jan 20
What if the key to becoming a multi-planetary species isn’t rockets, but microbes?
In the latest episode of Galaxy Balance, I sat down with Devon Stork, founder of the nonprofit Pioneer Labs, to explore a bold and necessary frontier: engineering microbes to support human life beyond Earth.
Devon’s work focuses ono microbial evolution as infrastructure, developing robust biological systems that can survive extreme environments and transform Martian regolith into usable soil. Rather than shipping everything from Earth, Pioneer labs is asking a deeper question: How do we let biology do the heavy lifting?
We discuss:
· Why microbes may be the first true settlers on Mars
· Designing evolutionary “chassis” for extreme environments
· Converting regolith into fertile soil using biology
· The role of open science in accelerating planetary-scale challenges
· What is really means to think about life support as a living system.
This conversation is about aligning evolution, engineering, and long-term human survival.
If you are interested in synthetic biology, space exploration, or how life adapts at planetary scales, this episode is for you.
#SyntheticBiology #SpaceBiology #Mars #MicrobialEvolution #OpenScience #LongTermFutures
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Devon Stork retweeted
Jan 15
In partnership with @Pioneer__Labs, we’re proposing Tesseract: a large-scale, open microbial phenomics dataset to functionally annotate microbial genomes at scale. 🧬🤖
✅5M diverse genes x 50 host strains × 100 conditions
🔗 Read the proposal: zenodo.org/records/17990299
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25 Dec 2025
We learned something from each of these, and I hope that by sharing, we can help someone else learn the same lessons without the failure part.
Posting negative results publicly should be more normal!
25 Dec 2025
We just wrapped our 12-day Negative Results Advent Calendar 🎄⛔🧪 Now it’s all in one place, with extra context a few runner-up failures we didn’t post the first time 📉🤦 Take a look for a behind-the-scenes look at how science happens. 🔬❤️rynomad.github.io/stubsack/#…
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Devon Stork retweeted
24 Dec 2025
That’s the end of our Negative Results Advent Calendar🎁🚫😜12 days of mistakes and weird data, and what we learned along the way🔬😅We'll post the collation of them all and a few honorable mentions tomorrow❤️
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24 Dec 2025
Not all libraries are created equal, and we're still figuring out which summary statistics and cutoffs to use when evaluating them. I'd love to hear any tips on Gini coefficients or Simpson indices, and how to apply them to large DNA libraries.
24 Dec 2025
⛔ result 12: Some of our libraries are already pretty skewed before we start selection 😅📊 Not always bad enough to trash, but it means we need much bigger bottlenecks to avoid chopping off all the low-abundance members 🧬🔍🧵
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23 Dec 2025
Good QC metrics are essential to good science, and I especially like this one. It'e asking if our variance is explainable by sampling noise (var/mean = 1) for every barcode in the library. From there you can track down the problem. In this case, insufficient DNA input into PCR.
23 Dec 2025
⛔ result 11: We barcode the genome and use Illumina reads to track fitness of 5E6 strains at once 🧬📊 But at that scale, you need to add µg’s of gDNA to avoid bottlenecks. We didn’t, so our variance ended up far above Poisson noise 🤦♀️📉🎲
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Devon Stork retweeted
4 Dec 2025
New Blog Post: How to Not Make a Scientific Journal by Accident
pracheeac.substack.com/p/how…
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22 Dec 2025
You don't realize how much you're leaning on antibiotics and fast growth times to prevent contamination until you need to do experiments without them.
These excisions need almost the same level of sterile technique as human stem cell culture.
22 Dec 2025
⛔result 10: For genomic integration in C. necator, we do repeated rounds of integration & excision🧬🔁That means days of growth without selection, and C. necator is so slow-growing it usually gets contaminated 😭 Other strains outgrow hitchhikers, but not this little guy🐌🧫
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16 Dec 2025
Excited about this one — it’s our first glimpse of what the HGT crank can show beyond just single fitness numbers.
Just the beginning of what’s possible as we scale our datasets to more donor genomes, host organisms, and selection conditions!
16 Dec 2025
3 short vignettes from our Horizontal gene transfer crank 🧬📚
1. Epistasis shows up in our fragment libraries 🧩
2. Pooled libraries let us screen many genomes at once 🌳
3. Protein embeddings help predict which genes work in new hosts 🤖
Read it 👉rynomad.github.io/stubsack/#…
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Devon Stork retweeted
16 Dec 2025
3 short vignettes from our Horizontal gene transfer crank 🧬📚
1. Epistasis shows up in our fragment libraries 🧩
2. Pooled libraries let us screen many genomes at once 🌳
3. Protein embeddings help predict which genes work in new hosts 🤖
Read it 👉rynomad.github.io/stubsack/#…
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