BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPrize in Chemistry to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”

@CBBaileyLab, @joshbaccile & team with an article on discovering the limitations of crypto-#ACP probe design for thiotemplated natural product chemical biology in #ChemBioChem:

…mistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cb…

Establishing Conserved Biosynthetic Gene Clusters of the Phylum Myxococcota biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

My dept in London at Imperial (Bioengineering) is recruiting a group leader at Professor level 🧑‍🎓 Please RT. It's a great department with world-class expertise in all sorts of biomedical & biological engineering topics, including synthetic biology. 🇬🇧imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-jo…

Citation metrics: In the US I found they were not at all emphasized when applying for grants. I would look up my H-index/total cites once a year when filling out some annual paperwork for the university.

In Australia I find them extremely emphasized in grant applications.

To be clear, there were often sections when I would make an argument about my track record/contributions to science/relevant pubs, highlight 1st or last authored papers esp. w/ PhD students and postdocs, demonstrate I had published high impact papers or highly cited papers, etc.

It just wasn't as focused on metrics

Exploring alternative hosts for engineered PKSs is a promising strategy. In our latest publication, we established P. putida as a production host for unnatural polyketides.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Establishing a High-Yield Bacillus subtilis-Based Cell-Free Protein Synthesis System for In Vitro Prototyping and Natural Product Biosynthesis | ACS Synthetic Biology
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

General vibes right now

Dotmatics, the company that owns @GraphPad Prism, @Geneious and @SnapGene was just acquired by Siemens for $5B. With plans to create AI-based software

If Columbia hadn't caved on $400 million, Harvard wouldn't have been targeted for $9 billion. If Paul Weiss hadn't caved for $40 million, Skadden wouldn't have had to shell out $100 million. It's not rocket science, people.

Changes to ARC grants will make it harder for Australia to combat Trump chaos, researchers warn | Australian education | The Guardian theguardian.com/australia-news…

High-fidelity in vitro packaging of diverse synthetic cargo into encapsulin protein cages

"Fluorescent dyes, proteins and cytotoxic drug molecules can all be selectively packaged via a peptide-mediated targeting process."
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/an…

Excited to speak at the Cell Free Systems conference this year. Even better, I can stay with my parents in my childhood home who live minutes away from Northwestern!

aiche.org/sbe/conference…

Cell free people--anyone notice that E. coli tRNA is no longer being sold by Sigma: sigmaaldrich.com/AU/en/product/…

Any advice for alternative suppliers?

Expected, but demonstrates the issue when we keep getting advice to look at international schemes as one strategy overcome budget shortages in ARC/NHMRC funding as the US has historically been our biggest partner.

theguardian.com/australia-news…

"Sheehy said US funding accounted for more than $400m in 2024 alone – equivalent to around half the funding the federal government provided in research grants via the Australian Research Council."

I am very happy to be in Australia and love our community (and happy to be out of the middle of the mess in the US right now). But it's striking how much what goes on the US affects everywhere.