biotech-ml meetup on feb 11th in williamsburg!!! come!!! only a few spots left!!! quickly!!!!

life in new england

Recent interest in DIY bio has led me to ponder this question: Will we ever see a hacker movement in biology akin to what we saw with personal computing in the 1970s? Take homebrew computer club as a reference. You had a bunch of amateur electronic enthusiasts congregate to mess around within a given technology domain. To see what they could build, and share their ideas. Then you have a cambrian explosion of technological development in personal computing, because the component technologies are now accessible to individuals outside of the institutions that facilitated their early development. What is structurally similar / different about the spaces of computing in 1975 and biology in 2026? Are the differences sufficiently great that the 'homebrew biology club' never exists?

You know what, the proposed location really is begging for a gigantic arch.

Really late 90s and really early 2000s are interesting because they feel kind of like yesterday and really modern but there aren’t really cellphones around like a timeline where smartphones never were created.

New Yorkers whining about “transplants” will never not be funny. Not even 12% of NYC residents are from a state other than NY, and they’re disproportionately from NJ, CT, and PA. Yeah, I’m sure it’s marketing VPs from Essex County having schizo freak outs on the subway.

So excited for @matt_f_mcknight and the Perimeter team. It’s crazy to me in 2026 we don’t have real time eyes on pathogens trying to attack us everyday. This is a national defense infrastructure that is sorely lacking today, especially post dismantling of the CDC.

one thing that really differentiates NYC from other cities is that you have lots of parts of the city where residents are high income but a majority don't own cars - almost all of which have a lot of transplants

Nearly 200 years after nicotine was first chemically isolated, we’ve finally figured out its complete biosynthesis pathway. Doing so required an insane effort and many years of work. The authors — a Chinese group — ended up crossing 643 lines of tobacco plants to find a single mutant incapable of making nicotine. They next backcrossed and inbred that plant to figure out the specific mutations, in various genes, and map the enzymes responsible. Nicotine is made from two “ring-shaped” molecules fused together. One ring has five carbons (the “pyrrolidine ring”) and the second has six carbons (the “pyridine ring.”) Scientists already knew quite a bit about how these rings get made, but not every step, and not how tthey join together to make nicotine. The pyrrolidine ring starts when ornithine, an amino acid that is not used to make proteins, gets its carbon dioxide clipped off by an enzyme, called ornithine decarboxylase, to make putrescine. This putrescine then has a methyl group attached to it, and gets oxidized. At this point, the molecule is a chain with four carbon atoms; one end has an amine, and the other a methylated amine. The amine end gets cut off and replaced with a reactive aldehyde; the chain folds into a loop; and the methylated amine “attacks” electrons on the aldehyde to form the ring. To make the pyridine ring, plant cells first take aspartate (the amino acid) and oxidize it. The resulting molecule is then transformed into nicotinic acid mononucleotide, which is just vitamin B3 with a sugar and phosphate attached. This paper is the first to report that NAMN hydrolase clips off the sugar and phosphate to release pure vitamin B3; also called niacin or nicotinic acid. (The names are slightly confusing.) The paper’s major contribution, though, is in figuring out how the two rings get fused together. The nicotinic acid is unstable, so an enzyme quickly attaches a sugar to it. Another enzyme, called A622, then strips off a CO2 group, making the molecule reactive again. And finally, that reactive intermediate “attacks” the five-membered pyrrolidine ring to join the two halves together. Other enzymes strip off the remaining sugar to make nicotine. (This whole pathway is shown in the image below.) All of this happens on the surface of plant vacuoles. Many of the chemical intermediates are toxic, so they need to be sequestered and converted quickly. And as soon as the final nicotine gets made, a transporter pumps it into the vacuole, where it is stored away. It’s actually difficult to wrap my head around the amount of work packed into this paper, so I’ll just give some quick bullet points: 1. They grew 643 inbred plant lines, which were made by crossing together 26 different parent tobacco plants. They extracted metabolites from all of them. 2. They did a bunch of single-cell RNA sequencing on the tobacco roots to figure out which cells actually express the nicotine biosynthesis genes. 3. “Stumbled” upon a mutant plant which was not able to make nicotine, and then sequenced its entire genome. They also crossed back this plant and inbred it for two generations to find the mutation responsible; a single C-to-T swap. This experiment alone must have taken at least two years of work. 4. Fed plants with isotopically “heavy” nicotinic acid and then tracked its movements through metabolic pathways. 5. Collected at least 630 mass spectrometry spectra. 6. RECONSTITUTED THE ENTIRE PATHWAY IN FOUR DIFFERENT SPECIES: YEAST, TOMATO, EGGPLANTS, AND PEAS (!!!!!!!!) 7. And a lot more… Anyway, insane paper. China has been putting out incredible plant biology papers for the last several years.

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An NVIDIA powered farming machine uses Al vision and precision lasers to eliminate weeds in milliseconds without herbicides and without harming crops, a potential shift toward chemical free agriculture