"Engineering multiple levels of specificity in an RNA viral vector": Jenny finally led our covid-interrupted revision to completion. Thanks to the delay, we managed to incorporate our more recent RNA sensors and protease circuits into the RNA viral vectors

Stop by our posters at SEED! @haoyu_dai_dhy on our latest efforts to improve ADAR-based sensors (Day 1, #24), @FloraHU8 on their application to cancer ablation (Day 1, #23), and @Xiaowei0402 on an efficient algorithm to refactor proteins for biomedical applications (Day 2, #136).

Nifty work on plasmid chromatinization from @stergachislab ! "plasmids are indeed capable of recapitulating nuclear genome-encoded chromatin architectures, ... However, plasmids consistently adopt a heterogeneous and incomplete chromatin architecture relative to nuclear-encoded chromatin fibers, and surrounding sequence context plays an integral role in modulating whether a plasmid-encoded regulatory element will recapitulate nuclear genome-encoded chromatin architectures."

I have long written and spoken about the many ways US immigration policy harms international students and scholars. This has been true for as long as I can remember, including when I first came to the US on a single-entry student visa more than 20 years ago under a process formerly known as muslim registry program. But the current administration has gone much further, through arbitrary policy changes, travel bans, and broad visa processing pauses that leave folks unable to work, travel, or train. These policies affect a minority of scientists, and in the current state of the world they can be easy to overlook. But we should not let that happen. I wrote about the quiet loss of Iranian scientific talent in US labs for @TheScientistLLC: the-scientist.com/the-quiet-…

qPCR allowed us to measure transcripts, but just once, destructively, and only in post-mortem tissues. Here, we show we can record transcript level history in vivo and recover this information with a blood test to make a "noninvasive qPCR". nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

This is not real.

1/ Excited to share our new paper in Science: “Toward life with a 19-amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design.” @ColumbiaSysBio @ColumbiaBME @Columbia science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… 🦠🧬🛠️🖥️💥

Excited to report the first de novo enzyme catalyzing two of the most energetically demanding reactions in biology—phosphomonoester and phosphodiester hydrolysis—with catalytic efficiencies comparable to natural enzymes! 🚀 desB was designed zero-shot with dEVA. No structure prediction, no pre-defined motif, no reaction-intermediates. 🧵 @StanfordBiosci @bioe_stanford @SLAClab @EPFL @hes_so @simonduerr

Could the folding of synthetic gene circuits in 3D shape how genes are expressed? Today @ScienceMagazine we report on the role of gene syntax in shaping feedback between transcriptional activity and genome folding for advanced circuit design🧵 (1/n)

So you want to engineer your hiPSCs, but targeting DNA payloads requires multiple slow, inefficient steps for each construct. What if we could accomplish multi-site integration seamlessly? Come hear about STRAIGHT-IN Dual now out at Nature Biomedical Engineering! 🧵 Link at end!

A neat amplification system to improve the limited sensitivity/dynamic range of RADAR pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs…

We just updated our Germinal preprint for de novo antibody-like binder design! Featuring additional scFv designs, extensive experimental validation of epitope specificity and polyreactivity, and CryoEM structure courtesy of Jim Zhang and Bing Rao from Feng Liang's lab.

Abstract due in two days!

So excited that our work on Programmable Macromolecule Delivery via Engineered Trogocytosis is out in @NatureCellBio! Link: rdcu.be/fa90i @stanleyqilab @Stanford_ChEMH @bioe_stanford @StanfordBioX A 🧵on our story:

Engineering the next frontier of mammalian systems. Accepting abstracts through April 15 - submit yours now: bit.ly/4jQmrFj #mSBW2026 #SyntheticBiology #MammalianSystems #CallForAbstracts

New preprint from the lab led by the amazing Jack Bryant! # tunable genetic medicines, # endogenous ADARs "Regulatable In Vivo Gene Expression via Adaptamers" biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

Important paper from Jason Chin's and Julian Sale's labs realizing key operations needed for building synthetic human genomes. My repeated reaction reading this paper was "um, I didn't know you could just do that." science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/…