We know the peer review system is under heavy criticism. But can anyone propose anything better? I just received the reviews of two of our most recent submissions. They were very critical but immensely helpful. The peer review system has many flaws, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater 🙄!

Domain swap is a staple in protein engineering. But instead of trial & error, can we predict an ideal crossover w/ comp modeling? Happy to share a wonderful collaboration w/ Jürgen @lassak-lab.bsky.social at my alma mater LMU Munich to convert a protein ligase to an aaRS for β amino acids t.ly/lNpVw

Excited to share my paper! 🥳 Today in #Nature we reveal an 8 MDa Hdr electron bifurcating super-assembly in class I methanogens that couples the first and last steps of hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis. A lineage-specific adaptation to anaerobic niches. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dear fellow researchers. I think we need to discuss this: www.newscientist.com/article/2532... While peer review is flawed, and while preprints are a great way to share data before publication, as a community we mustn’t trade rigour for hype. This paper was peer reviewed and rejected.

What is 'SpudCell'? Arguably the greatest bioengineering feat yet

A prototype cell partly capable of replicating itself has been created using 36 existing bacterial genes, but it's not really a living organism – yet

newscientist.com

Last month was another record for bioRxiv submissions. The pandemic surge and lag now clearly in the past and the growth continues. Thanks as ever to all the authors, readers affiliates, funders and amazing internal openRxiv team who make this happen!

2/2 IMHO, an earlier (2025) paper by Juan Pérez-Mercader www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.... which hardly received any media attention, was comparatively more significant in the way towards synthetic life than the one now publicized without peer-review 🤷‍♂️

PntAB & SthA of #Pseudomonas are a flexible transhydrogenase system, supporting energy balance, acetate assimilation & formate tolerance, impacting redox-intensive & C1 metabolic engineering @michelepartipilo.bsky.social @labnikel.bsky.social @cp-cellsystems.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-systems...

We were the *Black SEVATH* band, I wonder why @sevaplasmids.bsky.social … 🤔

Angel Goñi-Moreno@angelgm.eurosky.social · 2mo ago

The 2026 Systems Biology Department's retreat. What a brilliant crowd! The t-shirt (artist: Marina de la Fuente) has a logo of every lab in the Dept. Our Lab is The logic Doors :-) Kudos to organizers: @angeles-hg.bsky.social, @pglekas.eurosky.social, @lewisgrozinger.bsky.social & Guillermo Gomez.

Back to Segovia for the last retreat of my Lab, along with friends and colleagues from ETH, Univ Sevilla, DTU and Univ Valencia. Great science & amazing discussions in the unique venue of the historical Dominican Convent of Santa Cruz la Real, now @ieuniversity.bsky.social

#SynBYSS Conference in Barcelona begins with Victor de Lorenzo & Ian Paulsen giving amazing plenary talks! @vdlorenzo.bsky.social @marcguellc.bsky.social @jcvi.org

Off to Barcelona for the 2nd SynBYSS Conf www.jcvi.org/events/synbyss organized by the one and only @taeseokmoon.bsky.social along with Marc Güell of @upf.edu & other local SynBio colleagues. Ready to take the pulse of the field & learn from many of its luminaries 😀. I will honor Gaudí in my talk 👇

I am excited to announce that MSU's Thermal Biology Institute, for which I serve as director since July 2025, is now officially the EXTREME BIOLOGY INSTITUTE (EBI)! 🦠 🔬 Thread below but your TLDR: rebranding ourself the EBI will bring in new research teams, now research directions, and new funds.

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Most productive and enjoyable sortie to Groningen for visiting @sebwenk.bsky.social, @karin555.bsky.social and catching up with friends and colleagues in @rug.nl Exciting discussions, unusually fantastic weather and great hospitality. What else can one ask for! Thank you 🤩!

Sebastian Wenk@sebwenk.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Today I had the pleasure of hosting the one and only @vdlorenzo.bsky.social at the University of Groningen (@rug.nl). He gave a thought-provoking lecture on the sub-cellular organisation in P.putida which sparked lively discussions and lasting inspirations. Thank you for the visit Victor 🙏🙏🙏

Today I had the pleasure of hosting the one and only @vdlorenzo.bsky.social at the University of Groningen (@rug.nl). He gave a thought-provoking lecture on the sub-cellular organisation in P.putida which sparked lively discussions and lasting inspirations. Thank you for the visit Victor 🙏🙏🙏

My group has a website now. Check it out! www.wenklab.com The sustainable and synthetic metabolism lab at the University of Groningen is engineering microbes to grow on CO2-derived feedstocks to enable a circular bioeconomy.

Sustainable Synthetic Metabolism Lab, Wenk Lab | Synthetic Biology University Groningen

The Wenk Lab at the University of Groningen engineers synthetic metabolic pathways in microbial hosts to create cell factories for a sustainable bioeconomy.

wenklab.com

Happy to share that I've accepted a CNRS Chaire de Professeur Junior position in computational biology as part of the Génomique Métabolique unit at Genoscope! Looking forward to working with my fellow researchers there as well as with the broader 🇫🇷 research community starting this summer! 🇺🇳/🇮🇹 🔜 🇫🇷

Off to RWTH Aachen University @core-rwth.bsky.social for a micro-sabbatical—time to rethink SynBio not as a tool for controlling & dominating nature, but as a means to negotiate with it and help heal the environment—and developing a new narrative re GMOs for bioremediation along the way 🤔

The first published article of my PhD. As described by @gerrich.bsky.social, we equipped R. sphaeroides with a MoClo system, characterized genetic elements, and applied a semi-automated approach for rapid strain construction. Such a nice collaboration!

Gerrich@gerrich.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Publication alert 🚨 A new Golden Gate MoClo toolbox for Rhodobacter sphaeroides is out and it's built on Zymo-Parts! @matick.bsky.social & Antoine took our framework and added many new genetic tools and a new automation angle. This adaptation is a dream come true for me. 1/10 🧪🧵

Great presentation by @francesarnold.bsky.social for the Backer lecture this afternoon! Organized by the Backer Foundation (www.backerfoundation.nl), held at the @rug.nl . About evolving an designing novel enzymes. Very cool! (With quite some machine learning and even some DISCO )

Happy to present our latest story: the BCRII complex with the Boll and @cellarchlab.com . Months of processing by @rnfr2d2.bsky.social. Also @tomaspascoa.bsky.social and @tamb-o.bsky.social managed an in-situ tour de force. And Lena Appel did amazing biochemistry. This story has it all. Enjoy it.

Tomas Pascoa@tomaspascoa.bsky.social · 4mo ago

1/ Excited to share our preprint! 🥳 Degradation of aromatic compounds, including BTEX pollutants, requires highly endergonic aromatic ring reduction. Using #cryoEM and in situ #cryoET, we show how BCRII couples electron bifurcation modules in one giant redox machine www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Publication alert 🚨 A new Golden Gate MoClo toolbox for Rhodobacter sphaeroides is out and it's built on Zymo-Parts! @matick.bsky.social & Antoine took our framework and added many new genetic tools and a new automation angle. This adaptation is a dream come true for me. 1/10 🧪🧵

Rhodo-Box: A Synthetic Biology Toolbox to Facilitate Metabolic Engineering of Rhodobacter sphaeroides

Rhodobacter sphaeroides is a purple nonsulfur alphaproteobacterium with a highly versatile metabolism. This microorganism holds promise as a chassis for sustainable biomanufacturing of numerous chemicals. Yet, its potential is constrained by a lack of standardized, well-characterized genetic elements to tune gene expression such as transcriptional promoters and ribosome binding sites (RBSs). In this study, we present Rhodo-Box, a comprehensive toolkit for R. sphaeroides created by adapting and extending the Zymo-Parts modular cloning framework. Using Rhodo-Box we built and characterized: (a) three broad-host origins of replication (pBBR1, RK2 and RSF1010), (b) a set of 13 promoters, (c) four inducible expression systems (NahR-PsalTTC, LacI-PlacT7A1_O3O4, VanR-PvanCC, and XylS-Pm), (d) 11 RBSs, and (e) four transcriptional terminators. Furthermore, we present a semiautomated, user-friendly cloning approach which enables rapid construction of R. sphaeroides strains. The Rhodo-Box toolkit equips R. sphaeroides with a standardized, automation-compatible collection of parts and workflows essential for efficient design–build–test–learn cycles and advanced metabolic engineering.

pubs.acs.org

🧵 Our new paper is out today in molecularcell.bsky.social! After 7 years of a truly intriguing discovery journey, we can finally share what controls how molecules move inside living E. coli cells. Spoiler: it's not what the field thought. A thread 👇 📄 doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2026.03.018

Excited to share our new paper out today in @science.org 🎉 We show that HGT via natural competence drives diversification of chromosomal integrons in V. cholerae 🤩 Below a 🧵 on key findings incl. background on natural competence in V. cholerae 1/ #microsky #phagesky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Torn between amusement and frustration that @alignbio.bsky.social cancels PETase tournament halfway through. Cryptic mail suggests they hugely underestimated how difficult measuring enzyme activity in high throughput really is. Better pulling the plug than lousy execution, but.. poor planning?

Do we grow wiser as we age? I spent 15+ years chasing glam journals, wasting time and energy (and frustrating my team and co-authors). I don’t want to wake up at 70 and realize my life went into convincing a few editors my work was trendy enough. Enough. I’ll try to be smarter.

mad neuroscientists marching in Berkeley

“Authors [&] reviewers tell us that they have had a more constructive experience…choosing eLife not because of our impact factor, but because of our process” 👆 eLife comtinues to provoke debate but this is perhaps the most important point elifesciences.org/articles/110...

Scientific Publishing: Rethinking how research is reviewed and published

Taking a radical new approach to the publication process resulted in eLife losing its impact factor, but authors, reviewers, editors and funders support the journal and its efforts to reform scientifi...

elifesciences.org

A childhood dream has come true – I was appointed Full Professor for Sustainable Biotechnology at the University of Düsseldorf @hhu.de : tinyurl.com/f43s74hp and as Director of the Institute for Molecular Enzyme Technology (IMET, www.iet.uni-duesseldorf.de/en/) at FZ Jülich @fz-juelich.de .

Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät

Heute ernannte Rektorin Prof. Dr. Anja Steinbeck den Biotechnologen Dr. Johannes Rebelein zum W3-Professor für Nachhaltige Biotechnologie. Rebelein wird damit auch Direktor des Instituts für Molekular...

tinyurl.com

I have a postdoc position in metagenomic exploration available in my group. Candidates with documented experience in phylo & metagenomics and preferably with petabase-scale data mining and GLM workflows are encouraged to apply. Come join us! 🧬🦠💻 Please repost Apply here: www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...

Postdoctoral researcher Phylogenomics and metagenomics

Are you just as excited as we are about the fascinating world of microorganisms? Do you want to contribute to exploring and genomically characterize novel prokaryotic lineages? Do you have a PhD degre...

wur.nl

Thijs J. G. Ettema 🦠🔬🇳🇱🇸🇪🇪🇺@ettema.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Come join us! Soon I will be advertising a postdoc vacancy in my group as part of my @erc.europa.eu AdG project 'DARK ROOTS'. Focus of the project will be on phylo- and metagenomic mining of novel prokaryotic lineages. I will soon post a link here - stay tuned, and please repost! #asgardarchaea