Plant and soil microbe engineering is a rapidly growing field. This "review" was written as a comprehensive guide to their genetic engineering, from the idiosyncrasies of promoter design to whole genome synthesis. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs…

Awesome news today -- @sunyesf scientists are de-extincting lost American trees! @USDA just approved a genetically modified version of one of the great American trees, the American Chestnut, that went effectively extinct due to an Asian fungal blight introduced in 1904 that killed 3-4 BILLION trees (some 120 feet tall) by 1950. By adding in one gene from wheat to the American Chestnut genome, conservation scientists at @sunyesf have shown they can make the American Chestnut resistant to the fungal blight and revive and bring back this American classic. Let's finish this approval by @EPA and get these planted so our kids can visit these forests!!!

1/ Let’s face it: we synthetic biologists are control freaks. We want every component to do exactly what we intend and nothing else. Our new paper asks what happens if we stop fighting biological “messiness”. @DukeBiodesign @DukeUBME nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

Meet MIT’s next generation of engineering talent at the BE & ChemE Career Expo on Oct. 20, 2026. Connect with undergraduates, PhD candidates, and postdocs from across MIT. Priority registration rates end Sept. 20—register today: ow.ly/gaXW50ZAWM3

Voigt Lab researchers have engineered bacteria that can function as transistors, allowing the team to create living “circuit boards” that can be printed onto a growth medium in a Petri dish. ow.ly/ouEW50ZAH9u @Geneticdesigner @nchembio

Boyden Lab researchers have developed a method for imaging neuron activity in the zebrafish brain. Each colored spot (green and yellow) represents an active neuron. ow.ly/AGyh50ZzSUf @naturemethods

1/6 🧬 Big news in genomics & synthetic biology! We @huijin6418 @BenLehner present the complete mutagenesis of both the genome and proteome of the bacteriophage ΦX174! 📖 Read the full preprint on @bioRxiv here: doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.25.…

Direct protein sequencing via nanopores is hard. Peptides move fast. So glue the protein to the pore so it can't move + use an enzyme to cleave off one amino acid at a time. Each amino acid can then be measured 100s of times. They sequenced a 22 a.a. protein with 98% accuracy!

Who's up at BATS? Bishal Thapa (@Geneticdesigner): “Engineering Radiation Tolerant Fungi for Space Biomanufacturing” Blythe Irwin (Birnbaum & DeKosky Labs): “Introducing RePLiCA: A Replication-Based Protein:Ligand Cellular Activation Assay”

Exhibition Features Gene-edited Glowing Plants in China 💡🌱🧬 🔗isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechupda… #Avatar #CRISPR #bioluminescent

Mesmerizing light sheet imaging of neutrophils swarming at a yeast target! The neutrophils were labeled with SPY650-DNA (yellow) and a calcium dye (blue). This movie is part of the recent manuscript by Evelyn Strickland that we highly recommend reading! biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

NEWS: Department of War Narrows Technology Development Focus to Half Dozen Areas war.gov/News/News-Stories/Ar…

How Ancient Roman Automatic Doors Worked 🤔

Now online! Remembering David Baltimore (1938–2025) dlvr.it/TNxrHN

Prof. Hamilton Smith at J. Craig Venter Institute, a Nobel laureate for discovering type II restriction enzymes, passed away last night. A huge loss in Science, but his legacy will be remembered. @JCVenterInst @NobelPrize jcvi.org/about/hamilton-smit…

Excellent employment opportunities from Fieldstone Bio. 🛰️🌈🦠linkedin.com/posts/fieldston…

Coming soon to a field near you!

On June 16, 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, that living organisms are patentable. It was a narrow 5-4 decision, but it laid the legal foundations for the entire biotechnology industry. (From the Archives) The First Patented G.M.O. Read & subscribe! press.asimov.com/articles/gm…