Phil Ross retweeted
FYI I wrapped a lot of immuno-informatics predictors so you don't have to:
openvax.github.io/mhctools/
(eg NetMHCpan, MHCflurry, Pepsickle, DeepTAP, ERAMER, BigMHC, PRIME, &c)
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Phil Ross retweeted
More data showing how many lives Waymo saves. Long overdue to bring it Boston.
270M+ miles. 841 fewer injury-causing crashes.
Our latest safety data shows the Waymo Driver continues to make roads safer for everyone.
Compared to human drivers across 5 territories, it reduced:
📉 Injury crashes by 82%
📉 Serious injury crashes by 95%
Full data: waymo.com/safety/impact
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Phil Ross retweeted
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼
With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.
To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.
The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.
This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.
It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️
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Phil Ross retweeted
When you go skiing in the winter, and see those big machines spitting out snow, know that they are spitting out purified proteins made from dead bacteria.
I didn’t realize this until recently! Basically, they take Pseudomonas syringae cells — not engineered; a natural microbe found on plants — and grow them up in huge bioreactors. The cells make ice-nucleating proteins, which sit on their outer membranes and help ice crystals form. The cells are concentrated, freeze-dried, and sterilized until only these proteins remain.
The reason these proteins are useful is because they help water molecules form ice more quickly. Water can remain liquid even below 0°C, and only freezes when enough molecules form into a crystal. The proteins have, on their surfaces, repeating snippets of amino acids that help water molecules organize into that shape.
So these snow machines just blast super cold water with these proteins, and the two hit the air, mix together, and immediately freeze into snow.
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Phil Ross retweeted
Neural organoid work was billed as a way of replacing animal research. But when the organoids are implanted into animals, no animal research is replaced, and we've created a type of animal with unknown welfare needs.
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Sorry last post was a little crude. I just have a harder and harder time looking past the extent to which we manipulate other mammals for “humanity’s benefit” when I see work like this
Today in @Nature, we report a new approach to studying human brain development and modeling disease in vivo.
Human neural #assembloids and #organoids have opened new ways to study development in vitro, but they also have important limitations. Transplantation can provide a more physiological environment, yet human cortical cells then develop within a rodent brain that matures much faster, constraining their growth and integration.
To address some of these limitations and obtain more advanced functional readouts relevant to disease biology, we generated #apallial mice, in which ~98% of the cortex and hippocampus fail to form, creating space for transplanted human cortical organoids to grow and integrate extensively.
We call these #xenocortical mice (XCX).
Nearly 7 years in the making. Congratulations to an extraordinary team and wonderful collaborators!
Link to the article below 👇
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Phil Ross retweeted
Escalante has one of the best technical blogs in AIxBio.
They gained some notoriety after winning the @adaptyvbio protein design competition, but protein design is just the tip of the iceberg. In this latest blog they discuss a bit more about the assay they’ve designed to measure biophysics at scale.
We got really good at DNA sequencing a long time ago. Ever since, any problem that can be turned into a sequencing problem can be magically solved, giving rise to *-seq methods that form the backbone of modern genomics.
This team at Escalante has done this for protein binding kinetics. A million interactions in one tube, one overnight reaction, one sequencing run. Worth the read... blog.escalante.bio/how-to-se…
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Phil Ross retweeted
Things that have increased risk much more than AI:
1. The naive belief that asymmetric weapons can be made in bio bc of AI
2. Slowing effective global monitoring and scientific sharing bc of geopolitics
3. Gutting CDC
4. Poor economics on ID drugs
5. Vaccine hesitancy
1. >10M people die of infectious diseases per year today. AI is already helping us get better at tackling that.
2. Many ways to create very dangerous bioweapons without any AI/synbio (and it was true for the last 50-75 years). The delta on risk is quite small imo.
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Phil Ross retweeted
We are hiring! 🌟 Dept of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago is searching for a tenure-track assistant professor. It's a broad search: we want great colleagues doing serious biological work at the molecular scale. Please share!
apply.interfolio.com/191981
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Phil Ross retweeted
Life updates: @AsimovPress is officially back, with a renewed focus on original reporting and arguments in biotechnology.
Also, we'll be helping (some) scientists launch philanthropic funds around the ideas published in the magazine with @RenPhilanthropy. More on this soon!
It's official: We're back!
Asimov Press is returning with a sharper focus on intensive reporting in biotechnology. We're also working with @RenPhilanthropy to build our ideas in the real world.
See more: press.asimov.com/articles/ba…
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I always wonder how many people know this explicitly versus implicitly, those that just don’t get it, and how easy it is to tell these people apart. Not easy in my experience, but maybe my emotional era needs more emotionmaxxing
I wonder if this is actually even a bigger deal than I thought — perhaps you can only recognize in others something to the extent that you've seen it in yourself: if you think you're exclusively motivated by Reasons, you'll assume others are too, etc…
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The responses to this are depressing. COI: I’m an immigrant who moved to the US (much younger than Jason) and eventually became a citizen, got a PhD, etc.
As director of a PhD program in the US...every week we have to deal with complete stupidity from our own government about international students. Serves no purpose other than chaos.
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Phil Ross retweeted
That’s an absurd take. Any advances made by AI are only possible because experts generated the data and models for AI to aggregate.
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Phil Ross retweeted
New job alert! We’re looking for computational biologists to do some analysis and application of tools/workflows we’ve built @ArcadiaScience and help make them more useful for a broader set of users.
Looking to hire several people to start ASAP, so apply now (or please pass along if you know someone who might be a good fit)!
job-boards.greenhouse.io/arc…
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Phil Ross retweeted
Can we design molecules that rewrite how organisms interact with the environment? I'm delighted to share our lab's latest work, where we use structural biology and chemistry to modulate insect behavior in a clade of destructive agricultural pests. Congrats Steve and team!
Excited to share our updated preprint on moth pheromone reception!
Can we leverage structure-based pharmacology to disrupt insect olfactory behavior?
We designed small molecule inhibitors that hijack moth pheromone receptors to block mate recognition. A thread:
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