Howard Salis

NEW paper 🚨! We engineered TNT sensors in soil bacteria for long-term detection of explosive in natural soil, enabling geospatial detection of contaminated soil. This work (led by Erin Essington) included new sensors, circuits, modeling, & a 28-day testing workflow. 1/ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Synthetic bacterial community colonizes wheat roots grown in soil and mimics the assembly pattern of a field community bioRxiv from @fredebak.bsky.social et al #NNF_INTERACT www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Passing through Coralville, IA! Shout out to IDT!!

It's an OK article but the tag line should be "Trump illegally cancels Northwestern's contracts and refuses to pay them", not "Trump blew up Northwestern's business model". If you hold up a bank at gunpoint and abscond with bags of money you're not "blowing up its business model". You're stealing.

What a shitty time to run out.

In a remarkable new paper, Qureshi and Duss use multi-colour single-molecule fluorescence microscopy to directly and simultaneously track transcription, translation & coupling 3/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Could not agree more. The Prez & VP are shameful, embarrassing Putin puppets & a disgrace to our country. 🤮 #SlavaUkraine 🇺🇦

Normalize calling Republicans Nazis.

Wowzers the SNL 50th anniversary special was truly fantastic and man did I need to laugh a bit to cleanse the soul after the last two weeks. My favorite bit: youtu.be/l8GbTZ8v1-w?... The whole Shebang is streaming on Peacock.

Simultaneous in vitro expression of minimal 21 transfer RNAs by tRNA array method https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.15.638384v1

I am hearing that about 1/2 of the ARPA-H staff were probationary and are being let go. Many of these folks are long-time NIHers who were promoted into new positions in ARPA-H and became probationary in these new positions despite many years of NIH service.

Today's the day! Getting ready for the workshop on #AI in #Biology. While these fields aren’t new (of course!), the intersection of the two is having a major moment right now.

Thrilled to have @hsalis.bsky.social as the keynote speaker for today’s workshop on AI in Biology! After a prologue of intense discussions, he follows the tradition of every visitor by stepping onto Km 0 at Puerta del Sol—the geographical center of Spain & a place of significance for every Madrileño

BREAKING: Federal judge in Boston broadens block on Trump's NIH grant 15% overhead limit (indirect cost rates) to all recipients nationwide. Doc: www.documentcloud.org/documents/25... #TROpalooza ain't done

What if CA, MA, & other high-GDP states passed State Law to redirect all federal tax collection to a State bureau, which would only redirect taxes to the Fed if Federal Law wasn’t blatantly ignored (by vote of State legislature)? Another lever of “checks & balances” & a “soft secession” when needed

We just launched a 16TB archive of every dataset that has been available on data.gov since November. This will be updated day by day as new datasets appear. It can be freely copied, and we're sharing the code behind it to help others make their own archives of data they depend on.

OMG the troll that demands that the U.S. stay out of world affairs now wants *us* to OWN the most controversial land in the world. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. Sure looks like Trump is a Russian asset. Is it Stupidity or Treason? If you can't tell ...

Delighted to share our latest paper describing a method to read the levels of hundreds of metabolites or drugs in parallel using DNA sequencing. This method, which we call ‘smol-seq’ (Small MOLecule sequencing), harnesses the power of DNA sequencing for metabolite detection: rdcu.be/d8xLv (1/6)

New and important: we built a federal expenditure tracker. All expenditure line items that are available on the Daily Treasury Statement. USAID was zeroed out on 1/28 and has been at zero ever since. www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin... #EconSky

I won't be around for ToxTueday, so you'll have to settle for ToxMonday, instead. Today, I'm posting an experiment I did about 5 years ago with my old lab for some "team building." So what did we do? Look for drugs on money, of course! What did we find? Lots, but you'll have to keep reading:

Ribosomes cooperate through transient collisions to ensure efficient translation www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @cellcellpress.bsky.social @marvintanenbaum.bsky.social

Hello Everyone! 👋 Nucleic Acids Research is excited to be on Bluesky! Please follow us for the latest #Research, #Breakthrough articles, journal issues and more. Also, please consider adding us to your starter packs!

Deleted, reposting to clarify: the NSF statement does not define "DEIA", I haven't used that term in the proposal for my current NSF project. I could guess what it means, but that's not my job. I would need to know what specific activities I'm not allowed to do before I change any plans.

Leveraging AI for Systems & Synthetic Biology 🤔? Learn about the latest developments in the upcoming annual Colloquium of our Sys Bio Department this Feb 14. Starring @hsalis.bsky.social as opening speaker and featuring @alfonsovalencia.bsky.social along with other luminaries in the field 😱!

Wait until they process a modification to your statement of work. (They will never do this). Until then, point to your approved statement of work.

Looking forward to this timely workshop on #AI in #Biology at @cnb-csic.bsky.social (Feb 14)! Excited to hear from experts like @hsalis.bsky.social , @alfonsovalencia.bsky.social , @noeliaferruz.bsky.social , @pablocarb.bsky.social , and others. (Note: Won’t be streamed.) 🧬🤖 #Science #synbio

Extensive new preprint with Ying Teng's lab on how carbon monoxide affects soil communities and activities. Contrary to popular belief, CO at biologically relevant concentrations mainly stimulates rather than inhibits growth. Diverse bacteria grow and fix CO2 with it. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Given that there’s a pause on FDA comms right now, it may be useful for Americans to sign up for Canadian recalls, since many products are sold in both countries. Eg fellow celiacs, this may clue you into products to watch out for on the US side too: recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/subscribe

If you’re enjoying this, some of the best sci-fi I’ve ever experienced is being written by @mikeduncan.bsky.social over on the Revolutions podcast right now on the Martian revolution.

Fun to see it out in print! I was really lucky to have an amazing team to work with on this. If this sort of work seems interesting to you or someone you know, please feel free to reach out (planning to staff a lab later this year). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bluetorial-A dream and a bit of a nightmare Serving as Editor-in-Chief at Science was fascinating. I greatly enjoyed working with talented and committed editorial, news, graphics, and production staff. But the inside look into scientific publishing and AAAS was also deeply disillusioning.

OK, so in honor of MLK jr, what are some modern ways to practice non-violent protest for the 21st century? I'll start: what happens if 20 million people stop paying federal income tax?

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Q for all the genetic circuit engineers (SynBio peeps) out there: I'm looking for examples of genetic circuits with many layers. A layer here is where an "upstream" regulator regulates the expression of a "downstream" regulator. Could also be "longest path" from input to output. Ty in advance!

FYI the designed esmGFP is 58% identical to the most similar extant GFP sequence - hence "500 million years of evolution" - but nearly half of the novelty (the 42% unaligned part of the seq) is derived from one other protein. Originally caught by @btnaughton.bsky.social, source link in alt text

If you've recently purchased a portable generator due to power outages caused by the LA fires, remember to keep it outdoors at least 20ft away from your home and make sure your carbon monoxide (CO) alarms are working. 1 generator can produce as much CO as hundreds of cars and CO can kill in minutes.

What do bacterial cells do when they run out of nutrients? Although most bacterial studies focus on cells in exponentially growing states, in the wild bacteria likely spend most of their time slowly starving to death. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/ Hello BlueSky world -- my first post is about a new study from the lab, just published in @nchembio.bsky.social. We demonstrate how population-level gene regulation can be dynamically controlled and amplified using programmable gene transfer. Link to paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

And the MASBN Symposium is now in full swing as Sherry Gao from UPenn kicks us off

In our New to the Mid Atlantic session, we're pleased to have Ophelia Venturelli tell us about multi-scale dynamics in gut microbial communities @oventurelli2.bsky.social #MASBN #synbio