Real life, baby

Turns out the future does have flying cars

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), which funds high-risk, high-reward science, is spending £66 million on 19 research projects that will aim to make the mitochondrial genome programmable. chemistryworld.com/news/uk-f…

He's made a great distinction and analogy: work versus gym. If moving heavy things around as work, then use a machine to help if it's available. If moving heavy things around to get stronger, obviously do it yourself at the gym. I was thinking about how I have these modes when I'm coding. Sometimes I just want something to be made - work. Sometimes I am learning and practicing coding - skill. And I'll add a little twist - I often use AI when I am learning and practicing coding - here the AI is like my personal trainer, checking my form, giving me tips, explaining best practices.

Assembly theory for life detection. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.26…

🚀 New research! #ImperialChemEng researchers & @AstraZeneca have developed LipidXplorer, an automated platform that generates and screens hundreds of lipid nanoparticles every hour. By combining robotics and microfluidics, it could accelerate: 🔬Drug delivery 🤖AI-driven nanoparticle design 🧬Synthetic biology 🧫Materials science A major step towards faster discovery in nanomedicine and beyond. Find out more: imperial.ac.uk/news/articles… #OurImperial @YuvalElani

😍😍😍😍

We're hiring a postdoc to join the Elani Lab @imperialcollege on an @ARIA_research programme in mitochondria engineering. Looking to use microfluidics to encapsulate phages in liposomes for delivery applications. Interested? Then get in touch! imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-j…

New lab paper from our lab!: LipidXplorer, an automated microfluidic platform that can generate and screen hundreds of lipid nanoparticle formulations every hour. We're using it to accelerate discovery in drug delivery, membrane biophys & synthetic cells. advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley…

One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and often their echo of your own tangle of thoughts comes out quite a bit cleaner than what you started with. The result is that you improve the mind meld and have to correct things less from that point on.

Claude Science is incredible. I gave it some sequencing data, and in 8 hours it did a full analysis, generated figures, wrote a paper, submitted it for publication, got rejected, revised and resubmitted, got rejected again, it is now applying for positions in industry

We have developed an entirely new mechanism of action for gene knockdown -> trafficking of targeted mRNAs to the lysosomal, using lysosomal trafficking oligonucleotides (LyTONs)! Published in @ChemicalScience Led by @disha_kashyap_, with @milnetom68 pubs.rsc.org/en/content/arti…

Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first time that can feed, grow and replicate like a natural cell. This breakthrough in synthetic biology could usher in an era of made-to-order organisms that function like living machines. cnn.it/4v7rwxe

Nucleotide-Level Chemical Reaction Network Modeling Enables Quantitative Prediction of Reconstituted Cell-Free Expression Systems pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs…

SynCell Asia initiativeです、アジアでも盛り上げていきましょー　nature.com/articles/s41587-0…

I'm fascinated by efforts to make animals (or parts thereof) photosynthetic. For the latest attempt, published last week, researchers took thylakoids from plant chloroplasts (the little membranes that carry photosystem I and II proteins) and inserted them into the eyes of mice. Specifically, they gave the animals eye drops containing the thylakoids twice a day for five days. The thylakoids went into corneal cells (apparently they are small enough that the cells endocytose them?) and did photosynthesis, making NADPH and ATP from light. This isn't a gene therapy, though; the eye cells cannot make more of these plant enzymes, and so the photosynthesis only happens for about 8 hours before the enzymes are destroyed. Why do this in the eye? One reason is that light doesn't penetrate tissue deeply; maybe a millimeter. Therefore, the eye is one of the few parts of the body that actually gets light exposure. It is also -- maybe equally important -- immune privileged, meaning these plant proteins don't trigger an inflammatory reaction (which would likely happen in other tissues). I'm not sure this paper has any real utility, at least not clinically. The authors say that it does (to help treat corneal injuries, for example) but I think it's just expected for authors to make up claims like this to get published in CNS journals. The more interesting reason to read this paper, I think, is just that it shows light can be used as a direct "metabolic input" in mammalian cells. You can use light to make energy molecules and NADPH, which can then be used by the cell's normal pathways. This isn't the first paper to do stuff like this, either. There is a rich history of (temporary) photosynthetic animals! In 2011, Christina Agapakis & co. injected living cyanobacteria into zebrafish embryos, and it worked. (No developmental impact on the fish.) In 2024, a Japanese team put chloroplasts from red algae into Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells, and the chloroplasts apparently survived and did photosynthesis for two days. Biotechnologists have a great ability to harness GENES taken from nature to build useful tools and therapies. We can sequence the natural world, collect genes in databases, and use tools like AlphaFold to figure out what they code for. But our ability to harness entire organelles -- structures crafted over millions of years of evolution, which perform functions that cannot be matched by genes alone -- is severely limited. Animal photosynthesis, and pursuits thereof, might be a useful way to start closing this gap.

Fancy doing a PhD opportunity with us at Imperial on building Synthetic Cell Therapies? Then check this out and apply to our mini-CDT. imperial.ac.uk/medicine/stud…

#AngewandteHighlight Synthetic Microbial Ecosystems for Stable Flow Biocatalysis (Nan-Nan Deng and co-workers) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…