Emma Chory, Ph.D.

Today the Chory lab is at Universal Studios in Super Mario World and similar to how a mushroom can give Mario powers, we in the Chory lab use molecular evolution to find mutations to improve proteins in therapeutics. This retreat has taught us that we can design experiments to have broader impacts.

Hope your day was better than Darwin’s, on this day 165 years ago

This time, I had so many open tabs — from 66 year old warnings about AI doom, to 20 years of claims that robots are about to do ALL the laboratory science — I gave them in their own entry. @chorye.bsky.social, if you want more of these for your automation classes, lmk!

Deeply honored to be named a 2026 Beckman Young Investigator #BYI!🧬 This recognition reflects the creativity and hard work of my incredible lab, and we are so grateful and excited for the Foundation's support as we tackle the next generation of continuous evolution.

:: deep exhale ::

On top of the slowdown in grantmaking I wrote about last week - this is another deeply worrisome trend for scientists, physicians, patients, families, and basically anyone who wants new treatments and new tools to promote health. 🆘🧪🥼 open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

A Purpose-Built Open Source Liquid Handler for Industry-Class Automated Experiments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.709168v1

An autonomous system for multi-objective continuous evolution at scale https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.709196v1

NIH research grant funding rates plummeted in 2025. Agency acknowledges young investigators are losing out as result of multiyear funding policy imposed by White House. | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️🐝☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️

Happy holidays from all of us in the Chory Lab and our lab neighbors at Duke!☃️🎉 @chorylab.bsky.social @dukeubme.bsky.social

Exciting opportunity @pasteur.fr for junior scientists aiming to create their research group !

A foundation model for microbial growth dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.01.691707v1

The weirdest move is automated letter-request systems sending emails with no deadline included.

2011 v 2025. Variance not statistically significant.

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on. (Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

We're thrilled to announce SeqHub, an AI-enabled platform for biological sequence analysis. SeqHub brings together sequence search, genome annotation, and data sharing in one place.

Teamwork makes the scream work. Happy Halloween from the Chory lab! 🦖🎃👻

Best group costume 2025! #JurassicLab 🦕🦖 @dukeubme.bsky.social @chorylab.bsky.social

The Crick is looking for new junior group leaders! Any postdocs or early career researchers wanting to be our colleagues should apply 👍

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Interested in using microbes to degrade plastics? We made the discovery that two breakdown products of PET, MHET and BHET, are readily taken up by E. coli cells Our latest preprint exploits this surprise to realize improvements in cell-based upcycling www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The things Apple will do to procrastinate improving Siri

Reviewer #3: Major Comments: 1) The absence of ref Ahlqvist et al. (2024, JAMA) calls the manuscript’s central claims into question. This selective omission undermines the work’s credibility. Major revisions required prior to resubmission. ::cough peer review cough:: @washingtonpost.com

The @washingtonpost.com story on Tylenol & autism leaves out a MAJOR 2.5M sibling-controlled study of children in Denmark, which "found no evidence that acetaminophen use during pregnancy was associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Years in the making — Mice Against Ticks is on @60Minutes this Sunday! 🎥 Sneak peek: www.tiktok.com/@60minutes/v... 🌐 Join the fight! miceagainstticks.org Huge cheers to our amazing team, brilliant collaborators & island communities for bringing this story to life! 💛 #LymeDisease #MITMediaLab

"The PI does not seem to have experience with these downstream biochemical assays, and no collaborators were identified for cell-based applications.” lol.

As stressful as it is to run a laboratory in the US right now, my thoughts are often with the NIH staff living in the awful chaos trying to preserve the whole enterprise. I’m grateful for every moment they choose not to give up. These people are the only thing keeping it from entirely collapsing.

:snaps: :snaps: :snaps: Just loved this, @erika-alden.bsky.social We’re obsessed with better ways to track & share science. This ELN+LIMS built in Notion + Airtable is usable, readable, and full of real stats & insights. and it's pretty! erikaaldendeb.substack.com/p/an-ai-read...

With NIHs new 6-grant/PI cap (incl resub) we’re locked out for a year. We submitted duplicates bc FOAs were being pulled mid-sub & were told to submit to the parent. I get that POs are overwhelmed, but we’re all trying to stay afloat. MultiPI collabs will suffer. Welp, guess I’ll get my wkends back.

I saw it firsthand at the Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting--international young scientists welcomed and recruited in Germany and elsewhere. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Tattoos can be removed but the eRAcommons graveyard is forever.

After a quarter of a century, the UCSC Genome Browser remains an essential tool for navigating the genome and understanding its structure, function and clinical impact https://go.nature.com/40wPxkB

If you don’t have time to take a walk, then you don’t have time to do science. Charles Darwin would take two walks every day on his "thinking path", not as a break from science, but as a crucial part of it.

Duke appears to have lost NIH grants because they used the prefix "trans" in reference to disease transmission, transgenic genetic material, translational studies, or signal transduction www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

The 500 additional GRFPs NSF awarded were not very evenly distributed across fields, it seems. www.science.org/content/arti...

Worms are legit the best. Jealous of all wormies who get to do amazing wormy science.

I’ve never published a paper where peer review didn’t meaningfully improve the science and how we communicated it. The difference between our preprints and final papers is always striking. So how do we preserve what works and fix what’s broken?

So stoked to see such amazing scientists and such amazing science in the HHMI Freeman-Hrabowski cohort. But in particular I am just so so so incredibly happy to be able to publicly celebrate the success of @alisonfeder.bsky.social! Go, Alison, go! www.hhmi.org/programs/fre...

Today I’m leading 152 House Democrats in challenging Trump's devastating cuts to life-saving NIH research grants. Congress—not Trump—controls federal spending. Trump must do his job, “faithfully execute” the laws and stop violating the Constitution to undercut public health.

To put these top-line budget numbers in context, cuts of this magnitude would effectively mean no new grants in FY2026. The entire extramural budget would go to existing, continuing grants. An abject failure of American ambition. And a betrayal of our global leadership in health science innovation.