Molecular scissors are more than just an phenotype that bacteria evolved in their war with phages.
AbuGoot team demonstrates the
#Fanzors
family to contain functional, RNA-guided endonucleases, and postulate how the early endosymbiosis of eukaryotes and prokaryotes led us here!
Thrilled to share the final version of our fanzor paper. Since our arXiv, we added a comprehensive analysis of Fanzor1 and Fanzor2's in vitro activity, intron and MGE organization, NLS acquisition, and mammalian genome editing activity.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my degree trying to evolve from being a
#biology
student who’s just comfortable at the bench, to someone who can wear both the
#bioinformatics
and wet lab hat
here’s what I wish I knew. bonus
@LatchBio
tutorial at the end ;)
The tree of life is full of surprises, but what about eukaryotic RNA-guided nucleases?
Here we classify HERMES, a system of TnpB homologs in both eukaryotes and their viruses. We profiled A. polyphaga mimivirus, a HERMES with a G…
Undergrads are a powder keg of talent and curiosity. But we're underexposed to biotech careers.
We’re proud to launch
@NucleateDojo
DojoExplore, the first general and open biotech course for undergrads.
Rolling applications close on Oct 5th, apply here:
We're super proud to be launching
@thebiodojo
: our hub for cross-disciplinary students active in life sciences research, engineering, and/or entrepreneurship.
Periodic updates, a landing page, and a quarterly newsletter soon to come.
It’s an absolute pleasure being a part of this awesome cohort of young scientists!
Huge thank you to
@c_hudpaz
and the team
@time_initiative
@AFARorg
for making this possible ❤️
🚀 Introducing our 2023 Time Fellows! These trailblazers are gearing up to redefine the future of aging research. Exciting times ahead as they embark on this transformative journey! Check out the faces behind the brilliance. 🌟
#TimeInitiative
#aging
#agingbiology
I am very excited to be joining the 13th Emergent Ventures cohort. A huge thank you to the team
@mercatus
and
@tylercowen
for providing this grant and investing in young people!
It’s an incredible honor to be in a cohort with such amazing scientists!
Huge thank you to
@time_initiative
and
@c_hudpaz
for organizing the fellowship, drawing up the support, and putting together an amazing retreat.
Be sure to watch the TIME alumns closely looking ahead! 🧬
Congratulations Time Fellowship Grant Awardees for pioneering groundbreaking projects in aging biology! They’re investigating the aging brain, long-lived bats, and leveraging AI for longevity medicine. See all 12 grant winners here.
#AgingBiology
#aging
Tonight I had the honor to host Professor JC Zuniga-Pflucker (
@uoft
) here at
@thebiodojo
We talked about the struggles ahead for innate cell immunotherapies, further advances required in single-cell analysis, the underappreciated aspects of autoimmunity, and much more.
Dojo is honored to pilot Nucleate’s first ever grant program for young undergraduate scientists!
Over the last year, our team has received incredible feedback and perspectives on the glaring inequities found within biotech and the life sciences.
We li…
In order to solve tomorrow's biological problems, we need more people who understand the biology.
It's a simple principle, but it's greatly overlooked when I talk to students who want to make an impact in synbio.
Through his work
@pillar_vc
@NucleateHQ
,
@MichaelRetchin
has helped advance a whole generation of future scientist-founders
His mentorship really focuses on understanding where you’re coming from and tailoring his advice accordingly. Hyped that he’s bringing back these 1-on-1s!
If you are:
1️⃣ applying to PhD programs AND
2️⃣ interested in startups or VC
3️⃣ comment here or message me for 1:1 advice!
(esp. for computational biology / chemistry, synthetic biology, bioengineering)
The Dojo team has big plans and a concrete set of steps to achieve them. We just need YOU on our team.
Our mission: to spread biotech education and research support to undergraduates everywhere.
Build with us, learn with us, and struggle with us.
We want to see you on board!
I've yet to see an undergrad course incentivize students to say "I don't know" when they genuinely don't know.
Being able to admit it is so key, and I only learned this from my job.
What if short answer exams gave part marks for "I don't know" as an answer instead of guessing?
My thoughts and reflection to close 2020: from pivoting wet lab plans to building
@thebiodojo
. It's been a privilege to learn from a community full of people I look up to.
Thank you to everyone reading this. 2021 is going to be an exciting fresh start!
Going to be in
#SF
from Apr 13th-16th for Race Against the Clock!
Anyone interested in talking biotech/deeptech, life sciences, art, and more: let's meet up :)
First-year of undergrad has been an amazing experience for my growth as a person. I wanted to share my perspective for ambitious incoming first-years, especially if you are an incoming student in a seemingly "competitive" program.
Humans need to continue innovating in avenues where things have failed in the past, in order to genuinely improve them. (Assuming that potential added value is worth it)
"Imagine if when the first steam engined blew up, we said 'oh no more steam engines for a while!'"
@naval
Why bother knowing biology if not for your future PhD or MD? To all my friends and incoming students who have ever asked this question, I wanted to write this blog for you:
The real question is now: what will you build?
Huge thank you to
@subaita_rahman
and
@_Carol_Mag
for seeing through an incredible house launch!
You guys built something captivating and special with this first Dojo House, we’re gonna carry on the legacy.
Great time this weekend at the Boston Biocomputing Hackathon!
It was inspiring to see the results of bringing together talented bio-developers and directing them towards a problem — creating workflows for scientists to process biological data.
Two of our favorite projects:
McGill iGEM made it to the Top 10 iGEM projects this year out of 350+ teams!🙌
Our team also secured the gold medal, and we are incredibly proud of our team!🏅
If there’s anyone who has demonstrated incredible leadership both inside and outside of the lab, it’s
@benjamin0chang
Congratulations on the well-earned selection!! 🎉🎊🍾
Huge congratulations to
@benjamin0chang
for a very well-deserved Rhodes Scholarship. 🎊
It’s been a true joy to launch
@harvardopenbio
with Ben, travel together to conferences like
@SynBioBeta
, and make new friends similarly passionate about biology
@NucleateDojo
. 1/2
Imagine ‘smart’ therapeutics that work like if statements - if transcript A is expressed in target tissue X, express protein payload.
@MichaelTrinh18
is co-developing such technologies at MIT’s
@mcgovernmit
. Read more on today’s Minute Scientist.
We will look back to the start of our first cohort on Dec 01 2020, and today, as the origin points of our generational impact. We have the greater biotech community as a whole to thank for their support of our MVP.
Now it’s time for us to scale, give back, and leave our mark.
We’re so so proud of both the rockstar team who’ve made Dojo’s rise possible and all the students who’ve gone through our programming ❤️
The team put together an incredible recap of their accomplishments and I’m so excited to see what’s in store 👇🏼
Presenting DOJO WRAPPED!
Since 2021, we've transformed from a humble Facebook group into a vibrant, worldwide community of undergrad innovators shaping the future of biotech.
We have big plans for 2024 & beyond - here's a snapshot of our impact so far: (1/n)
The
#1
question I've been asked since starting BioDojo: "what's the best way to run a community?"
One year into this journey, I thought I'd share my takeaways instead of my standard end-of-year update. Thank you to everyone who has helped along the way!
Congratulations
@KKajderowicz
on this huge matching feat! People like you and
@MichaelRetchin
are doing a huge favour for the next generation of scientists ❤️
Wow.
I was able to match (800+ mentors [current/former PhD students] with 1200+ mentees [prospective PhDs / current applicants])
10X increase of matches from last year’s match program.
Learned many lessons (the hard way😅) this time around —scaling up is tricky (thread)
1/n
The homies
@LongXbio
are putting together a longevity + biotech bootcamp for undergraduates in the longevity/biotech space.
Learn about how aging works, the inner workings of biotech, and mastermind moonshot ideas! 🧪🚀
Amazing story from the
@wyssinstitute
on one of their most incredibly accomplished undergraduate scientists
@ayushnoori
Ayush has been one of the most hardworking, inquisitive researchers I’ve had the privilege of meeting
Craziest thing about Ayush- he’s just getting started 🤯
When
@ayushnoori
was young, his grandma was diagnosed w/ progressive supranuclear palsy. Unsatisfied w/ the lack of treatments, Ayush began his scientific career at the age of 12. Read & listen to Ayush's story and find out how he would
#ReimagineTheWorld
.
Finding age-related biomarkers to characterize an aging cell is like finding gold in the longevity field.
Autoimmunity, immune dysregulation, and immunosenescense are the common denominators in age-related disease. Our best shot at finding age-related biomarkers may lie here.
Our first public event is live! Join us for a chat with Brandon White on his journey from SAAS to biotech on February 19th 🚀
Brandon went from a senior PM
@Uber
AI to scaling growth
@Freenome
from $10M-$500M.
⏰ Sign-up closes Feb 18th 11:59pm EST.
Saturday nights
@thebiodojo
: discussing fundamentals, limitations, & ethics behind CRISPR-Cas9
We covered some key issues: NHEJ vs HDR, double stranded breaks, cytotoxicity, and indels. It was also a perfect opportunity to introduce the Cas9/nCas9/dcas9 toolbox to everyone :)
If anyone has access to a completed genome sequence of SARS-COV2 sample from:
- Iran
- Spain
- Belgium
Please DM or send the link in the comments, would greatly be appreciated!
Imagine that within only two months of moving to a new neighborhood, you end up running 150km + an additional full marathon (42km) to raise funds for that neighborhood’s food bank.
This is what excellence looks like. 🙇🏻♂️
@tommytrxnh
@CityNewsTO
I'm excited to be hosting
@wilsonpoon
from UCSF's
@McManus_Lab
for a lesson on how mRNA vaccines are designed and delivered!
Mark the date! Saturday Apr 24th, from 5PM-6PM ET
🗣Have you heard the news? We're hosting our second public event!
Wondering about they hype behind mRNA vaccines? Or how were they designed?
@UCSF
's Dr. Wilson Poon (
@wilsonpoon
) will be teaching us about the science behind it all.
Sign up today!
🔗
My Q1 takeaways:
- Communities are products, have high standards for UX
- To learn from scratch, the first step is to overcome ego
- Incoming interns: see if a hobby uniquely complements your job. If possible, take on "side tasks" that use those skills
BIG NEWS:
Dojo House, the first biotech hacker house, is coming back to Boston for a second summer!
🗓️June 1st - August 11th (10 weeks)
📍Cambridge, MA
🧬 Biotech education & training
🎤 End-of-summer pitch night
We're looking for 8 undergrads to join us, learn more below! 👇
It's one thing to write a blog post you're proud of.
It's a whole other feeling to see talented the world resonate with it so well that they translate it.
A huge thank you to
@terakispa
for translating "The Builder Age of Biology" into
#Indonesian
!
Nucleate Dojo is providing stipend grants!
If you’re an
#undergraduate
student in the US or Canada who is partaking in an unpaid life sciences research opportunity, send us your application :)
Hospital in Spain offers home-brewed CAR-T cell therapy at 1/3 of commercial cost.
Hospitals can’t manufacture most medicines. But for CAR-T, patients’ own cells are removed + reprogrammed + returned to kill cancer.
“The process is the product”
🇪🇸 🧫
Now
@geochurch
is auctioning off a copy of his genome as a
#NFT
, that got me thinking about decentralized science funding.
Imagine a lab that's struggling to get grants. Lab decides to create its own coin, ICOs, crowdsources funding from the interested public.
Huge congrats to Alishba Imran on co-authoring this text book 📕
It’s incredible seeing her years of startup and research experience cumulate into this, all at the early stages of her career as well!
This is awesome! We're seeing the transition of a classic microbial synbio application (Assessing water quality) into something that can be done without cells.
celebrated my cofounder and very good friend
@MichaelTrinh18
’s 21st birthday yesterday by zooming in to celebrate with the rest of the
@NucleateDojo
team in Boston 🥹
i love this family we’ve built together 💜
(1) I'm excited to be sharing this project that I have been building out since March. I've used a suite of open-source computational tools to generate and screen siRNA oligonucleotides against specific regions of the SARS-COV-2
#coronavirus
genome.
Thinking about hosting an AI + Biology Hackathon at our office (Mission Bay, SF) this Saturday. DM me your email if you would like to attend or help me share this with them.
Do you know an undergrad or graduate student who is involved in designing new
#biobricks
, genetic circuits/devices, etc? DM me, I'd love to reach out!
#IGEM
#Synbio
We love seeing young people enter our institutions who signal: passion, intelligence, and empathy. These make good leaders.
But it feels like we forgot how important it is to value the drive to take up high accountability positions and pursue risks. All this makes great leaders.
CellNoir
#1
is out, starting off 2022 featuring:
- The boom of research papers identifying new CRISPR-Cas tools.
- Programmable RNA sensors for detecting your cell of choice.
- An art/film director combining early 2000's chaos with brand-name advertising.
HAPPENING TOMORROW
How do we improve academic culture & practices to be more conducive to good science?
@alexeyguzey
, author of "How Life Sciences Actually Work" will join us to explain the vision behind his new initiative to study progress in academia!
Huge thank you to
@prashantpbagga
for hosting this conversation! Loved the discussion that covered everything from the future of online communities to how RNA sequencing works and why it matters :)
A study by
@hkumed
reports that Omicron replicates ~70X more efficiently in the bronchus than Delta.
However, Omicron replicates ~10X less efficiently in the alveoli (where oxygen is diffused into the blood).
My friend
@SeyoneC
wrote what was basically the prequel to my article on the Builder era of Biology. I'd urge any of my engineering friends who have are even remotely curious about biology to give it a quick read!
Hey biotech twitter! My friends and I
@thebiodojo
are trying to put together a resource for young people trying to break into biotech (for lack of better words).
Please send any resources that might be worth adding (or people to talk to!)
October's edition of CellNoir is out!
I cover the state of Dojo heading into the school year, talk about our future plans, and explore the ways that ancestry was expressed as art in the ancient West African city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀.
👩🎓🧬 13 Biotech Student Groups
Some of the best free events, programs, and career opportunities are actually organized by students!
These are the amazing student biotech groups I follow.
THREAD🧵
there’s a story here, there always is when you’re trying to build workflows…
coming soon to a bioinformatics livestream near you. 🤫
@MurtoHilali
@LatchBio
As promised, CellNoir Issue 2 is finally out. In this issue, I cover the blossoming contemporary art scene in pre-WWII Japan, as well as an emerging strategy to accurately deliver nanoparticles to different organs.
DojoExplore
@UCBerkeley
: ONE DAY LEFT TO APPLY!
Join us weekly this semester to learn about the fundamentals of building and scaling biotech startups out of academia and into the market 🧬🦠💉
⏰ apps due Feb 2 at 11:59 PM PST!!
1) Over the last 2 months, I have been thinking about tinkering with our current understanding of T-Cell therapeutics, CAR-T Cell procurement, and design, and applying it to something new:
The issue of Senescent cells and their paramount role in unhealthy aging came to mind.
Experimenting with programming a filter for image flipping:
one mistake in my original design made a new filter I totally wish
@Instagram
had
(left = before, right = after)
Latch Verified now has three Bulk RNA-seq workflows that should be simple to use, flexible, and easy to scale.
1. Bulk RNA-seq generates count matrices
2. DESeq2 finds and displays top differentially expressed genes
3. Enrichment Analysis!
Lastly…
Time to flip the common "how do I work in problems in biology?" question my engineer friends ask me.
To all my engineering friends:
Where should a biologist start if they want to implement engineering principles into their workflow?
What does an undergraduate scholarship, summer co-living house and biotech seminar series all have in common? Nucleate Dojo is cooking up all three.
Our team is looking to recruit 8 passionate, driven students to help!
Sound exciting to you? Apply here:
It's pretty awesome how dancing makes robots less intimidating. Looking forward to seeing more nontrivial Machine Learning on these robots. Credit: Boston Dynamics.
I'm super excited to announce Synex's funding!! We're building something that WILL change the face of healthcare and self-measurement. Stay tuned for updates, what we're building is going to blow you away 🤯
@nimivashi15
On a student level, my colleagues and I created
@thebiodojo
for this.
We expose students in life science research and students in engineering programs to the open challenges facing different life sciences disciplines and bring in academia/industry to give their perspectives.
This is going to be an awesome talk!
It's going to be exciting speaking with
@paulkhls
on the future of how labs can raise funds for a project, as well as what he and the team at Molecule are building.
Imagine a world where labs can create their own cryptocurrency and raise research funding that way?
Join us for a conversation with
@paulkhls
, CEO of (
@Molecule_to
) on the future of research funding!
To use it, you swab your vagina and send in the sample, which is analyzed using metagenomic sequencing, meaning it looks at everything, not just part of the genome or DNA.
It costs $129 for a single swab, and subscription options are also available.