We appoint researchers from across biology and biomedicine to set up their first groups at the Crick.

Here the authors leverage a crossfeeding, engineered microbial community to demonstrate that strain abundance cycles are robust across environmental conditions. They pair this with a nonlinear dynamic model to elucidate population cycles.

Self-driving laboratories that integrate robotic production with artificial intelligence have the potential to accelerate innovation in biotechnology. Because self-driving labs can be complex and not universally applicable, it is useful to consider their suitable use cases for successful integration into discovery workflows. Here, we review strategies for assessing the suitability of self-driving labs for biochemical design problems.

Synthetic one-carbon assimilation could contribute to a more sustainable and circular carbon economy, but much work in this field has focused on model microorganisms. Here the authors provide their perspective on the potential value of non-model microbes, and how that potential could be realised.

This Perspective examines the technological landscape to bridge the gaps between CRISPR-based diagnostics and nanomaterials, proposing specific synergies that could catalyse their development and application.

The current form of life on Earth is the outcome of a series of biochemical events that led to the formation of early life with a specific molecular composition encoding its many functions. However, other trajectories of events with widely different ...

Engineered gene circuits often degrade over time due to mutation and selection. Here the authors use a host-aware modelling framework to develop genetic controllers to sustain synthetic gene expression. They identify a range of design trade-offs in production, robustness and long-term performance.

Genomes contain orders of magnitude more open reading frames (ORFs) than known protein coding genes, and recent work suggests there may be unannotated proteins present in even the best studied organisms. To address this gap, we used a high throughput reverse genetic toolkit to construct precise C-terminal fusions of a reporter (and control) to >120,000 ORFs in model E. coli . We found hundreds of unannotated significant hits, and individually detected >50 novel polypeptides by western blot, including ORFs within tRNA loci. Many ORFs overlap annotated genes in the sense orientation, and we found these are likely chimeric polypeptides produced by ribosomal frameshifting. Using degron based knockdowns, we identified unannotated proteins that have putative fitness effects, and we found a novel small protein that displays phenotypes consistent with a role in the mRNA degradosome. The observation of a range of unannotated translation products should lead to better annotation and understanding of the bacterial domain of life and motivates the continued exploration of genomes broadly. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.