First swarm experiment! 8 CLBOH (Capsaspora little box of horrors) mapping out a phenotypic landscape while trying their absolute best to not burn the colture room to the ground! Read link to our PRXLife paper in the next massage to see what's going on

A new study from @maorknak.bsky.social and colleagues introduces CoSMIC, a hybrid sequencing strategy that improves microbial community profiling resolution and sensitivity across novel habitats versus standard 16S methods while lowering per-sample cost,.

CoSMIC: A hybrid approach for large-scale, high-resolution microbial profiling of novel niches

Standard microbial profiling based on 16S rRNA (16S) sequencing suffers from a lack of primer universality, primer biases, and often yields low resolution. We introduce ‘Comprehensive Small Ribosomal…

plos.io

New blog post! I’ve been 3D printing a lot lately, which naturally got me thinking about how little my printer cares what I’m trying to do, how fragile it is, and how goal-less it feels. Still, I think every biologist should definitely get one. www.maorknafo.com/reducible-be...

3D printers are inherently anti-developmental (but are huge fun and you should definitely get one) — Maor Knafo - System Biology

I love 3D printing. I'm fascinated with it to the point where the stuff I make is, sometimes, almost meaningless. I love the designing part the most, all the problem-solving, contorting my brain to im...

maorknafo.com

Science, at its best, is just a bunch of people saying, “Look at this crazy shit!” At its worst, it’s someone saying, “But what’s the mechanism?”🧪

This is the pipeline I've built and use to find crispr targets on weird organisms, if anyone is looking for one: github.com/maorkn/CRISP...

GitHub - maorkn/CRISPR_HUNTER: scripts for genric crispr desgin

scripts for genric crispr desgin. Contribute to maorkn/CRISPR_HUNTER development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

The 60s were a weird time, and no one was weirder than a group of scientists studying the transfer of memories via cannibalism in flatworms. A new blog post in praise of cellular learning! www.maorknafo.com/reducible-be...

Memories all the way down. — Maor Knafo - System Biology

Could memories be an emergent cellular property ? The 60s were a weird time, and no one was weirder than a group of scientists studying the transfer of memories via cannibalism in flatworms. Flatworm...

maorknafo.com

Wrote a short story www.maorknafo.com/reducible-be...

Laplace and All His Demons. — Maor Knafo - System Biology

The evening deepened. The games were played, the food was eaten, and the events moved along their planned course, drawn by invisible threads, traveling along hewn tracks. Noah rubbed his eyes sleepil...

maorknafo.com

This is an image that has haunted me since I was a child because it captures something truly inherent to the human experience. We can get used to anything. A new blog post about habituation—it's been a while, needed to get un-used to a few things. maorknafo.com/reducible-beau…🧪

Waddington's landscape contamination in the lab today! 🍄📷🧪

A new #preprint! Variability is strange, right? Especially when it arises in the background of an identical genetic background. Why would cells, having the same machinery, regulation, and environment, behave differently? Why would there be #noise? 1/13 rb.gy/45y36m

Terrarium going a bit crazy these past weeks. Constantly changing. 🍄📷

ganoderma sp.? 🧪🍄📷 "What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive" Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

Guys, guys, am I just seeing things or is this a budding yeast cell??? Great song BTW 🧪🍄

Mine is kinda long... But beautiful.

Dr Rajika "Reggie" Kuruwita@reggiek.bsky.social · 3y ago

Share your #thesis quotes! #academia I quoted Douglas Adams in mine. The scene where they find Magrathea.

Starting to look like autumn (finally). False parasol? 🧪🍄

🧪🧪New blog post! How (and why) do organisms optimize tasks, and why are they flat about it? The use of Mutual Information in Pareto fronts and slimy aliens.🌌👾📊 maorknafo.com/reducible-beau… In the comments, I'll link to the previous posts, which I think are helpful (and cool😆).

🧪New Preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Is microbiome surveying accurate? Meaningful? Robust? For the most part, the answer is sadly underwhelming, especially for those working in undersampled niches. 1/8