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Sebastian S. Cocioba

@atinygreencell.bsky.social

8.6K followers 6.6K following 3.3K posts

Amateur 🌿 Biologist • Aspiring 🌻 Designer Independent Researcher at Binomica Labs Degreeless Heathen • #diybio • #homelab Open Lab Notebook: tinyurl.com/ATGCFFE YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/@atinygreencell

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · Jul 8

Excited to announce some new plasmid offerings in my shop at atinygreencell.com! Here's a thread of the current catalog. All proceeds directly support my lab and my continued effort to build useful open-source tools. Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more. Please share! 💚

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Sebastian's Biotech Bazaar

Designer of fine, hand-crafted, bespoke, and fully open source biotechnology tools for educators and researchers. Plasmids, lab equipment, cell lines, and seeds. An ever-growing collection of high qua...

ATinyGreenCell.com

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 3h

No Ai image gen I've tried can modulate snapdragon petal morphology. They have no idea whats possible. We don't either, for the most part, but a tool set to be "ultimate creativity" is utterly derivative.

It either make photorealism or nonsense and nothing in between.

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 3h

Another concept I want to dive deeper into is the organism as a superposition of an inherited past and multiplicity of unrealized futures. Visually showcasing the landscape of potential will be difficult but worth it.

Lots of hard analogs to my own life navigating failings.

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 4h

There is this really aesthetic parallel between film photography and plant breeding I didnt notice until just now: the latent image

Silver grains capture starlight into an image that needs to be developed to be seen.

Plant breeding captures latent phenotype only seen in progeny

a canon camera with a floral design on it

ALT: a canon camera with a floral design on it

media.tenor.com

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 4h

Writing my first art grant applicaton for my flower work! It wont be much but it will open doors to future funding, and its not from the NEA so dont need to focus on weird trumpian asks.

There will be flowers for everyone.

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 21h

My entire uncareer. All of it.

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 1d

Has anything great happened in your life because of social media?

Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 22h

Why is anyone losing? I thought the whole point of Ai was infinite abundance? Should this not be the end of competition and resource scarcity?

🙃

Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 23h

Makes sense! Im thinking of just subdividing it as a CDS with N term, linker, and C term overhang grammar. That way the ends are still harmonious with all my golden braid promoters and terminators :)

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Reposted by Sebastian S. Cocioba

Urszula McClurg @urszulamcclurg.bsky.social · Mar 2

Another website worth checking is the jobrxiv.org which is great for PIs (preprint principles, free to post) and is becoming increasingly popular

Science Jobs - Find science and research jobs

The international job board for scientists, by scientists. Find science jobs in academia or industry: MSc, PhD, Postdoc, Scientist, Faculty and more!

jobrxiv.org

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 1d

Gonna explore some RNAi constructs since I know for a fact those are 100% off-patent and can help confirm some gene model hypotheses with less moving parts.

1. Sense-Intron Spacer Hairpin-Antisense.
2. Make dsRNA sandwich.
3. Done.

Good enough for a Nobel = good enough for me.

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 1d

Genuinely my favorite email to read first thing in the morning. All the new plant expression plasmids I built came back perfect.

Golden Braid remains undefeated.

Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 1d

Chammomile is so weird.

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 1d

She did an interview with me :)

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 1d

Really well! Just need to select for slightly shorter floral spikes; snaps often lean toward 18" at maturity but a few here are pushing almost 2ft!

Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 1d

I love my flowers

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

a man in a tuxedo and bow tie is sitting in an auditorium and giving a thumbs up .

ALT: a man in a tuxedo and bow tie is sitting in an auditorium and giving a thumbs up .

media.tenor.com

Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

The interesting part is that both the wild type and agro disks seem to do this, with total necrosis a week later. For a good negative control, I treat the wild type disks the sane way as the agro i.e. soak in same buffer, so maybe its the buffer surfactant? The plot — she thickens.

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

The last two petunia leaf disk transformation have this spot of death in the center. Overbleaching? Necrosis signal bc disk too small? Gonna do some tests to see whats causing this. First guess is the co-culture buffer. Let's find out!

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

Gotta be a cooler name than that, lol

Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

Is there a word for a plant that lacks anthocyanins, especially in a background abundant with it? Not albino, of course, but surely some way of quickly delineating such a common phenotype, right?

Reposted by Sebastian S. Cocioba

Chenxin Li, PhD @chenxinli2.bsky.social · 2d

It's grad school application season! My lab (cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/ ) will be recruiting a PhD student via the MPS program at MSU (mps.natsci.msu.edu) for Fall 2026.

Happy to take inquires via email (which can be found in the lab website) if you are applying this cycle.

Our current carbon economy relies on fossil fuels, from which we isolate small organic molecules to produce medicines, plastics, cosmetic, or other chemicals that we use everyday. However, sustainability requires a more biomass-based carbon economy, where we engineer plants to produce precursor molecules, which can then be assembled to desired chemicals that we use daily. Plants have evolved an amazing diversity of metabolites, but these metabolites are not produced in every cell of the plant. Therefore, it is essential to understand how plants can express different metabolic pathways across different organs, tissues, and even cell types. We are interested in the following questions: How are metabolic pathways (especially specialized metabolism) controlled by cell fate? How can we reprogram plant cell fates for biomanufacturing? How can we toggle between differentiated cell states for metabolic engineering and totipotent cell state for genetic engineering?

cxli233.github.io

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

just NaCl since i cant isolate just the salinity and some of the trace minerals become toxic if you concentrate the aquarium salts. also cant autoclave due to some salt conformations being cheap to make but bad if heated together

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

A month of cycling some client algae in my DIY turbidostat toward oceanic salinity. Got it to a bit over 30g/L NaCl or the waters just off the shoreline at a beach. Now to make backups and prepare for the next push to 40g/L. Yay, adaptive evolution!

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

I love how janky my gel visualizer is getting. I can fix this in less than 20mins, but its got so much character and so many memories in those dings and dents and chips. I can redesign a more robust more fancy sort of rig, but this one's unique. ❤️‍🩹

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Reposted by Sebastian S. Cocioba

Rachel W. Martin @rwmartin.bsky.social · 2d

If you are wondering whether you should put potato peels down the garbage disposal, this is a PSA that you should not.

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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2d

Oh those are a joke. I mean like actual agri tech aka GM crops and consumer facing ag biotech. Anything beyond seed, sun, and soil is a grift in most cases. Very few examples of sensible improvement in cost but never scale.