Synthetic biologist, programmer of cells, and lover of all things visual. Wakes up in the morning to learn some of natures secrets and do a spot of fly fishing.
University of Bristol, UK
- Tweets 6,524
- Following 1,603
- Followers 3,626
- Likes 10,192
I get goosebumps every time! @SpaceX bringing it!
🚀🌊 A month in Western Australia. A front-row view of Starship’s next chapter.
SpaceX’s Starship Recovery team spent weeks gathering critical re-entry data ahead of Starship V3’s debut flight, tracking the vehicle’s journey from Texas toward the Indian Ocean.
Watching the world’s largest rocket attempt re-entry from up close is the kind of experience most engineers only dream about.
Every flight creates data. Every failure creates lessons. And every lesson shapes the next Starship. 🔥🌌
1
1
2
234
A great CYBER visit to the Algal Innovation Centre at @Cambridge_Uni to see how some of the approaches and challenges to taking research with photosynthetic organisms out of the lab and towards scale-up and deployment. Excited to see what emerges from the visit! @UKRI_News
3
228
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
I just published What Happens When Programming Cells Becomes Affordable: A Scenario medium.com/@andrewhessel/wha…
2
7
27
2,916
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
This piece is about theoretical biology. But it's also about AI, and the gap between making a prediction and making a “conceptual leap.”
The greatest role of AI may be in exploring ways to make biology as compressible and comprehensible as physics. Read the latest essay. 🔻
Theory, in biology, has never gotten the same "respect" or "institutional standing" as theoretical physics.
This is a shame. Theory building in biology has been at least as fertile and consequential in the process of discovery as in physics. And yet, it has generally been hard to get funding for purely theoretical work in biology.
Biology also has difficulty compressing its empirical data into theories. In physics, there’s only one kind of electron, and what applies to one, applies to all. But biological cells and organisms are products of individual developmental and evolutionary histories. Biological variation can itself be irreducible and causally meaningful. This means that, often, biological models have many many parameters!
In our latest essay, @ulkar_aghayeva considers whether biology can be made as compressible and comprehensible as physics, and thus restore its institutional standing. She explains how a broad range of phenomena—including biochemical reaction networks, insect flight, and the eukaryotic cell cycle—are well described by so-called sloppy models. In such models, only a few parameter combinations are important to the observable behavior.
This discussion is particularly important in light of AI, and in answering this question of whether or not AI systems will ever be able to make great "theoretical leaps" for biology.
Read the piece and subscribe: press.asimov.com/articles/th…
4
7
69
7,727
Interesting paper out on plasmid copy number control: cell.com/trends/biotechnolog…
8
1,137
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Last week, I attended the Biocontrol Conference in Oxford! Coming together as a Control x EngBio community was absolutely fantastic - thanks so much to the organisers @jblugagne and @christian_cuba
You can catch up by reading my humorous SKETCH, linked in the next tweet
1
1
10
266
Using recombinases to build robust cross-kingdom genetic circuits? 🧬 Need to know what they are *actually* doing? We got you covered! In the latest from the lab, we show the power of nanopore sequencing for unraveling the inner workings of these circuits. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-7…
2
6
16
1,550
My favourite bit is observing the temporal dynamics of a recombinase cascade split across two plasmids, nicely matching up with a simple dynamic model. Quantitative biology for the win!
1
1
114
Finally, a big thank you to the funders @royalsociety, @BBSRC, @EPSRC, @NSF and @czbiohub that allowed for this international project to flourish.
56
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Our paper "Active-learning-guided optimization of cell-free systems for genome-wide transcriptomic profiling reveals progressive layers of regulation" is online @NatureComms !
Congrats @LeaWagnerSynBio, very proud of this work!
doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-7…
#cellfree #AI #T7Phage
9
29
92
8,861
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Characterization of recombinase-based genetic parts and circuits using nanopore sequencing
doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-7…
1
13
43
2,422
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Very impressive work by @marucci_lucia on an ambitious approach coupling ML and cell engineering #biocontrol26
1
6
722
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Fantastic presentation continues #biocontrol26 with @NoahOlsman work using mother machine for synthetic circuits charaterization at a scale I never seen before!
3
19
1,081
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
New essay: There is a little-known regulation that has been strangling biotech innovation for decades.
Engineered microbes that eat plastic, sense landmines, or destroy toxins? None are likely to be approved soon, even if proven safe and effective.
This regulation, called the Toxic Substances Control Act, is a black hole: between 1987 and 2018, researchers filed more than 240 applications to release engineered microbes outside of the laboratory, such as to clean up oil spills or degrade plastic. Only a few have ever been approved for use.
(Interestingly, the Act itself, as passed by Congress, doesn’t even mention biology! It was designed to regulate chemicals, and bureaucrats only later clumped biology into it.) Without reform, many of the world’s most useful microbes will never find use outside of the laboratory, even if they are proven safe and effective.
Here's one example:
In 2016, for example, Japanese researchers discovered a microbe that is able to digest PET, the plastic in water bottles and most polyester clothing. These wild microbes had taken an existing protein that degrades cutin (the waxy material on plant leaves) and evolved it to eat plastic instead. But natural forms of the PET-eating enzymes are slow; when the microbes were cultured on top of a thin PET film and incubated at 30 degrees centigrade, it took them six weeks to break it down.
Engineers in Texas, then, took these PET-eating enzymes and used computational tools to make an improved variant, called FAST-PETase. This enzyme is 98 percent identical to the natural version but digests PET plastics in less than 24 hours. They could put FAST-PETase back into living cells and release them onto landfills. But unfortunately, such an organism would likely be rejected by regulators.
Read more: worksinprogress.co/issue/all…
23
90
352
36,532
Sierns.jl 🧜♀️ for hybrid, multiscale modelling is out! Simulations consist of concurrently run models, each with their own solver, allowing you to produce large and complex simulations by only describing the individual sub-models and their connections. discourse.julialang.org/t/an…
1
5
581
Thomas Gorochowski retweeted
Introducing the T7 Promoter Calculator, our newest model that predicts the T7 transcription rate for every start site across a genetic system's sequence, including both canonical & low-affinity sites; and redesigns T7 expression systems to remove production of long RNA byproducts
2
34
138
9,855
Nature research paper: Degree-of-polarization modulation for high-dimensional optical computing
go.nature.com/4wWdpw9
4
11
62
35,604
If you are at #juliacon this year, be sure to check out Matt Owen from my group and his talk on Sirens.jl.
1
2
7
484