Good news everyone! Our new paper in OUP SynBio is out: Construction of a syntrophic Pseudomonas putida consortium with reciprocal substrate processing url: academic.oup.com/synbio/artic...
Many thanks to Barbora and our collaborators @mirobueno.bsky.social and @angelgm.bsky.social

Very happy and proud of this work led by @beaubd.bsky.social with many others involved, in which we show that synthetic C1 metabolism can do better than nature for biotech!

The New Rasputins. Recommendable reading by Anne Applebaum. How science is being replaced by a new wave of charlatanism and obscurantism. Is that "new" ideology or just a business plan?
www.anneapplebaum.com/2025/01/07/t...

Another good news everyone! Too hot to handle? Not anymore!:) We are making G- thermophilic bacteria amenable to metabolic engineering. New bug to learn: Caldimonas thermodepolymerans! Kudos to Nastya and colleagues from BUT enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

You remember Don't look up! movie, right? It looked pretty realistic already in 2021 but who would guess we would be living that tragicomedy in 2025... m.imdb.com/title/tt1128...

I've just deactivated my Twitter/X account after almost 9 years there. Easier than I thought. Twitter is dead, long live to the Bluesky! (at least until it's bought by another crazy billionaire...)

Good news everyone! (I'd need more good news these days) I'm happy to share here our latest contribution in COBIOT on advances in engineering substrate scope in Pseudomonas cell factories. Great collaboration with @stefanodonati.bsky.social and Miguel Silva! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So, EXPERIMENTS STILL MATTER! 🧪👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

AI & automation can support wet lab researchers—but skilled, creative scientists will always be at the heart of discovery.

#SynBio #Biotech #ScienceMatters

Instead, Salis calls for mechanistic ML models trained on well-defined, carefully annotated experiments.

AI is a tool—but not a replacement for rigorous, hypothesis-driven science.

One key takeaway from the @Nature discussion comes from Howard Salis, developer of the RBS Calculator. He warns against over-reliance on AI in biological design:

“It’s not science anymore—it’s literally a black box.” 🤖⚠️

For practical biotech applications nowadays, my take? Keep things simple.

Find nature’s best solution for a given problem and make only the minimal necessary genetic modifications to get the desired outcome.

Despite these challenges, the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle in chassis strain development is rapidly advancing our understanding of fundamental biological principles. 🚀🔍

We are not just engineering life—we are learning from it.

As we dive deeper, we’re realizing that bacterial genomes are far more crowded than expected, packed with overlapping coding & regulatory sequences. 🧬

Life’s complexity continues to surprise us—but maybe it shouldn’t. After all, we’re up against billions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning.

One of the biggest questions in engineering biology today is how reliable microbial chassis strains—bacteria or yeast with reduced or minimized genomes—will be for real-world applications. 🔬🧫

A recent @Nature article explores this: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Another cool example of synthetic #plastics #upcycling using engineered #Pseudomonas with expanded substrate scope👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

There's still time to submit your manuscript for the special issue of Microbial Biotechnology Biomanufacturing of specialty and bulk chemicals. Learn more on the MB web.

So proud of Barbora Jankovicova from @pavelcito.bsky.social! She made it to czech @forbes.com "30 under 30" list!
forbes.cz/lists/forbes...

Revolution in protein evolution?👉https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads0018

This looks like a cool new @Nature journal to follow👇 www.nature.com/natchemeng/ (#bioengineering, #synbio, #metabolism #engineering)

OA fees are rising without limit in many journals, while the publisher's service does not always follow this trend. It's encouraging to see these brave colleagues to say enough is enough: www.science.org/content/arti...

New year is here and so is our initiative Czech #SynBio Node (czechsynbionode.cz), which brings together research laboratories and other partners in the Czech Republic🇨🇿 who see #engineering #biology as a way to better understand living systems and advanced #biotechnologies.