Occasionally, I write news articles about recent synthetic biology papers for the Oxford University Press journal Synthetic Biology. These typically cover publications of broad interest to the synbio community and summarize, explain, as well as critique findings therein. If you want to know what a certain paper did, how it fits into the broader synthetic biology landscape, or how it could be improved, check out the articles below!
Arch enemy no more: designing the first synthetic globular all-beta proteins with beta-arches
In this article I write about a recent paper from the Baker lab, about designing proteins consisting purely of beta strands.
New adaptive laboratory evolution database highlights the need for consolidating directed evolution data
Here, I investigate new efforts to collect data from adaptive laboratory evolution experiments into a common database for analysis.
Speaking to nature: a deep learning representational model of proteins ushers in protein linguistics
The recent deep learning model of protein sequences, UniRep, by the Church lab was the subject of this article, in which I explained results & potential ways forward for this work.
Synthetic Bacterial Stem Cells and Their Multicellularity for Synthetic Biology and Beyond
My newest article deals with a paper from the Bennett lab which engineered bacteria to form a sustainable pool of ‘stem cells’ and various forms of modified, differentiated bacteria.
Engineering Life 