Looking forward to my first zoom call with an AI author trying to persuade me that he's a real scientist so he can post to ArXiv.

I think we are reaching a point in time where believe first and doubt second, will be flipped to doubt first and believe second - and that mindset transition is going to have a painful hit on online life and society in general. Depressing. #iwanttobelieve

they are all so humble

Overall we found genetic engineering and coculturing strategies possible in all strains, but with some being better than others. No single strain wins out as best for everything which is a shame, but future strain engineering may change this. Watch this space. 👀

And in a final bit of fun, they then showed how different engineered strains of BC-producing bacteria can weld their materials together in a patchwork form to create some interesting looking materials.

Stacey and Katie then went further and tested how the different bacteria can co-culture with engineered E.coli cells and engineered yeast cells, testing at different temperatures and assessing all sorts of metrics.

Stacey, Katie and Maria tested out genetic engineering using a modular SynBio toolkit (KTK) in 4 widely-used species of Komagataeibacter and compared successes and failures.

But different labs use different bacteria species due to historic reasons and whether engineering done in one species works in another is not clear. In this work we sought to address this through coordinated experiments in multiple labs.

What's this one about? It's about engineering different bacteria. We and many other labs around the world engineer and use kombucha-derived bacteria (Komagataeibacter) to make the bacterial nanocellulose fibres and hydrogels that form the bulk of new materials for dozens of applications areas.