Happy to report that I've joined the faculty of The Crick Institute in London as a Principle Investigator! I lead the Biodesign Lab, where we use 🤖 Robotics-Accelerated Evolution 🧬 to push the limits of biotech for use on Earth 🌎 and in Space 🪐 biodesignlab.co.uk

Who else remembers this issue of Nature? To say it was an influence on my decision to do synthetic biology is a bit of an understatement. I literally quit my day job after reading this.

Today in Nature Communications , Will Shaw (Will Shaw) and I finally share our new work collaborating with Xiaozhou (David) Luo @ SIAT, developing a yeast-based biosensor & workflow for screening microbially-produced Δ9-tetrahydrocannbinol, better known as 𝗧𝗛𝗖🧵nature.com/articles/s4146…

Read our latest publication about growing materials from bacteria! 🤯🦠👩‍🔬👨‍🔬🧬🧪 Thanks to all the co-authors and to our amazing PI! nature.com/articles/s4146…

Engineered living materials are a transformative and green technology. In this article for The Conversation U.S., I explain what we have accomplished, what's up next, and how we will change the field of materials. #materials #Science #synbio #WomenInSTEM theconversation.com/genetically-en…

Come join us. 3 open academic positions at Assistant Professor level available in my home department at Imperial College London. Engineering Biology / Synthetic Biology is within scope so please apply. imperial.ac.uk/jobs/descripti…

Really excited to finally share this preprint! It's a culmination of several advances in my group(optogenetics, bacterial gels, therapeutic proteins) and is the start of creating remote controlled engineered living materials for regeneration.@priya_dhakan Möglich Lab Varun Tadimarri

Meet 𝐋𝐢𝐥𝐚 - an Automated Scientist built by the Amyris crew to do E.coli and Yeast metabolic engineering by DBTL cycles. Lila has made 100s of biosynthesis strains. Perhaps she is going to make your PhD students feel a bit sad biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

ChatGPT for biology? Excited to share our work on LLMs for protein design out today Nature Biotechnology nature.com/articles/s4158… + Proud to publicly announce Profluent with a $9M seed round to tackle meaningful challenges in biology with AI. Join us!

At the limit, bioengineering is a medium for atomically precise, infinitely scalable technology. This has significant potential for accomplishing climate goals: we’re building Homeworld to encourage the development and ambition of the climate biotech community. More coming soon!

Oligo Recombineering (DIvERGE pnas.org/doi/abs/10.107…) - based bacteriophage engineering enables functional metagenomics in diverse pathogens - Nature Microbiology nature.com/articles/s4156…

Insightful paper Cell Systems by Ophelia Venturelli Harris Wang RodrigoLedesma-Amaro Alex Fedorec et al. What is the key challenge in engineering microbiomes? cell.com/cell-systems/f…

Excited to share our newest paper in Nature Biotech on robotic AI-enabled microbial culturomics! Congrats to Yiming Huang, ravi sheth and all coauthors. 1/4 nature.com/articles/s4158…

Amazing black cellulose materials by Marcus Walker!

We reprogrammed some bacteria, stuck them in a gel and shone light. YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT! If that clickbait worked, click this link to check out our latest work on bacterial gels for regeneration - doi.org/10.1002/adfm.2… Varun Tadimarri Priyanka Dhakane Advanced Sci News

New preprint: Cyanobacteria isolated from marine volcanic seeps display rapid sinking and robust, high density growth. Thanks to U Palermo and Two Frontiers Project, we got unique samples from Vulcano, Italy, where CO2 bubbles into the shallow ocean, 24-7! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

This work from Marcus is one of the most elegant I have seen!

Leibniz INM is a wonderful place for living materials research. I've visited them twice and am very impressed by their focus on ELM and how supportive the PIs are!