Professor of synthetic biology & chemical engineering. De Novo DNA founder. Engineering microbes with predictive models & algorithms.
Joined April 2009
- Tweets 3,562
- Following 263
- Followers 4,102
- Likes 2,876
189 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
27 Apr 2023
NEW PAPER led by @grace_vezeau! We rationally engineered synthetic riboswitches to carry out sense & respond for human biomarker proteins [mCRP and IL32-gamma] that indicate disease or infection. 16-fold activation without trial-and-error!
nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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A Low-Cost, High-Throughput Design-Build-Test Pipeline for Engineering Genetic Systems: Stress Testing with Complex Structural Proteins
doi.org/10.64898/2026.06.08.…
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🚨New Preprint!🚨 Type IV Pili (TFP) are the most common bacterial surface structures, making them promising for display across diverse species. Here we rationally design TFP-mediated display, applying it to the cyanobacterium Synechocystis PCC 6803! 🧵
doi.org/rbc8
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SPLICECRAFT v1.0 IS LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!
Open your terminal and type in "pipx install splicecraft" if you want to try it out, then spam "splicecraft update" often as I push updates frequently. A labor of love for the community I adore. Enjoy! 💚
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May 20
I want my super intelligent AGI to be like Vic Fontaine (Deep Space 9).
An emotive superintelligent hologram, but no need to lord it over the corporeals.
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May 15
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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May 12
Today we're publishing our index of unmet needs in human disease: 2443 indications scored and ranked on burden of disease, prevalence, pipeline activity, and treatment burden. We hope this will help drug developers identify overlooked medical problems
convoke.bio/blog/introducing…
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May 7
DARPA's O-circuit program looks cool [darpa.mil/research/programs/…] and it's totally feasible to engineer bacteria to detect 100 molecules & quickly control a drone through light signaling. But alas, approaches need to use neural tissue & not bacteria. Brains in jars, it is.
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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 4
manifold bio is hiring across AI platform scientist roles (link to job board in comments)
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Apr 30
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… 🦠🧬🛠️🖥️💥
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We benchmarked Arc Institute’s “MULTI-evolve” and found evidence that it learns a classical additive model, not epistasis.
Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Blog: dewitt-lab.github.io/posts/2…
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Apr 12
President @Caltech kicked off the 2026 SoCal Science Olympiad awards presentation. Very warm speech to all the kids.
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6 Dec 2024
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3 Dec 2024
An autonomous microbial sensor enables long-term detection of TNT explosive in natural soil
@NatureComms from @hsalis
"sensors and memory-storing genetic circuits inside the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis" 😲
nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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Howard Salis retweeted
13 Nov 2024
This is a great paper from the @hsalis lab.
- Measure the decay rates of 50,000 mRNAs in bacteria.
- Use biophysical models ML to build models of mRNA stability.
- Profit.
And a good reminder of what's possible when one turns a biological problem into a sequencing problem!
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11 Nov 2024
I've uploaded new versions of ApE 3.1.7. The Mac version didn't have the correct version number in the "Get Info" window. The Windows and Linux versions had a small bug that prevented them from running. All three errors should now be fixed.
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11 Nov 2024
Designing synthetic mRNAs 🧬 for optimal stability and expression? Checkout our work led by @DanielCetnar on biophysics infused machine learning approaches for delineation of mRNA degradation kinetics ⚡ out now in @NatureComms nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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9 Nov 2024
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