Marco Grillo

Marco Grillo

@mgrillo.bsky.social

Developmental biologist. Spatial omics inventor. Co-founder of spatial.ist and haga.bio Researcher at nilssonlab.org

280 followers518 following48 posts

Online teaching can be puzzling sometimes: it's difficult to read the room without being in the room. For me, it helps a lot if students keep their camera on during the lessons. That smile appearing on students' faces when they understand a hard concept is the best feedback I can get, even via Zoom.

Marco Grillo reposted

I'm excited to share our new preprint: Generation of a transgenic cephalopod tinyurl.com/pc86jxz8 Cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus & squid) are crazy critters that dynamically camouflage to their surroundings by changing the color, pattern, & texture of their skin, which they control w their brain.

Marco Grillo reposted

Nice example of how AI predictions are limited by the training set. AlphaFold has not learned the rules of protein folding, it's just great at predicting structures based on what it has already seen. Added constraints (e.g. alignment revealing conservation patterns) can help make a good prediction.

Stowers Institute@stowersinstitute.bsky.social

(1/2)When #AI couldn’t solve this protein structure, evolution helped scientists show it how. The @gallseeker.bsky.social Lab combined fieldwork, structural #biology + AlphaFold2 to uncover a hidden blueprint shared by thousands of rapidly evolving aphid proteins. New in @pnas.org: bit.ly/46E2XOx

Screen antibody collections for cross-reactivity against your favorite species! SixPack-AbScan is now posted as a preprint, with a few updates.

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social

SixPack-AbScan: a web server to discover cross-reactivity of antibodies across species https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.746162v1

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Screen antibody collections for cross-reactivity against your favorite species! SixPack-AbScan is now posted as a preprint, with a few updates.

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social

SixPack-AbScan: a web server to discover cross-reactivity of antibodies across species https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.746162v1

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3. The six-frame translation can be now performed in different genetic codes. No matter how weird your organism, you also deserve some good Abs! And now the final touch...

4. I added a "Protected catalogue mode". Here, users can screen for Ab cross-reactivity, get a hit list, but not the exact epitope-mapping info. This is to incentivize reluctant companies to share (privately with me) the mapping info, while still allowing users to perform their searches.

Screen antibody collections for cross-reactivity against your favorite species! SixPack-AbScan is now posted as a preprint, with a few updates.

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social

SixPack-AbScan: a web server to discover cross-reactivity of antibodies across species https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.746162v1

2. The app now can stream FASTA files directly from the NCBI FTP site. This allows much higher processing speeds and avoids having multiple downloads and uploads by the users.

I currently live a “double life”: I am both a Staff Scientist in an academic lab and Founder/CSO of a small biotech startup @hagabio.bsky.social . This is not super common, so I thought I’d put together a thread clarifying how this works, at least for me.

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I treat each meeting with a new potential customer like a mini brainstorming session. I get exposed to new science, sometimes very orthogonal to my main field of activity. I'm expected to provide quick and insightful feedback on subjects I barely know. It's exciting and challenging.

Through this work, I see my tools taken in directions I've always dreamed about, but never have the bandwidth or the knowledge to act on. Or to entirely new places! I find this beautiful. Each of these meetings make me think about my own science from a slightly different angle, and maybe improve it.

I currently live a “double life”: I am both a Staff Scientist in an academic lab and Founder/CSO of a small biotech startup @hagabio.bsky.social . This is not super common, so I thought I’d put together a thread clarifying how this works, at least for me.

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So, a lot of this double life is about translating concepts: I need to convert customer needs into scientific descriptions I can first understand, and then again into actionable information our company team can work with.

Viceversa, I need also to translate the functionality of products into something that makes sense to a researcher, in their own scientific terms and for their specific research question (of which typically I know nothing about).

I currently live a “double life”: I am both a Staff Scientist in an academic lab and Founder/CSO of a small biotech startup @hagabio.bsky.social . This is not super common, so I thought I’d put together a thread clarifying how this works, at least for me.

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A big part of my job as CSO is therefore talking to scientists and trying to understand what they really want to do and why. What is their question? Where are they stuck? Can we help them? Is our product the right solution? Will they succeed when using our products?

This is hard because scientists are extremely demanding. They will take the magnifying lens out and dissect everything you say, and they're usually good at it. As an annoying buyer myself, I think I know what I’m talking about.

I currently live a “double life”: I am both a Staff Scientist in an academic lab and Founder/CSO of a small biotech startup @hagabio.bsky.social . This is not super common, so I thought I’d put together a thread clarifying how this works, at least for me.

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Here's where my company personality steps in. Here my questions are: Can my tools help someone else? Can people realistically use them in their routine and solve a problem? Can a company sell them and make a living out of it? (this one being a particularly crucial question)

To sell my inventions as a product to someone else is both liberating and terrifying. A paying customer wants reliability, and trust our tools to back their own science up. Scary, right? I feel this is a huge responsibility, and I take it very seriously.

I currently live a “double life”: I am both a Staff Scientist in an academic lab and Founder/CSO of a small biotech startup @hagabio.bsky.social . This is not super common, so I thought I’d put together a thread clarifying how this works, at least for me.

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As an academic, I dedicate a lot of time to develop tools that I think might be useful for the community. I'm a molecular biology nerd and I love creating things that others can use for their research questions.

Tool development is tricky. Do you create tools with a specific research question in mind? I sometimes do, sometimes don't. However, I feel pressured to bundle my tools with a cool application (that I don't always have in mind), to publish higher. Tools, however, can also be given away.

I currently live a “double life”: I am both a Staff Scientist in an academic lab and Founder/CSO of a small biotech startup @hagabio.bsky.social . This is not super common, so I thought I’d put together a thread clarifying how this works, at least for me.

The first thing to say is that I am amazed this is even possible. I am in a system and in a country where I can have some flexibility in how I define my job, and this is not to be taken for granted. Thanks Sweden!

The second thing is that this my double life is not simply “doing academia half of the time and startup stuff in the other half”. My two lives have sometimes different languages, different incentives, different timelines, and different definitions of success.

Marco Grillo reposted

🎙️ Yesterday, Hower was invited to present our in situ technology at the VIB Spatial Omics 26 conference. It was a great opportunity to show the spatial omics field what we have been brewing!🔬 Thank you to the organizers and everyone who joined the session!✨ Catch Hower at poster #63 today💬

Marco Grillo reposted

Marco Grillo reposted

Marco Grillo reposted

Janelia is built for this moment. Starting today, we're taking on 2 big bets: cracking how a vertebrate brain generates behavior, & building AI-in-the-Loop Discovery — a new way of doing biology. Tiny transparent fish + one of neuroscience’s biggest questions? Let's go: hhmi.news/2BigBets

Marco Grillo reposted

Our latest: Minimal essential requirements for neural tube self-organisation How does a single cell give rise to a tissue with the right cell types in the right proportions? We deconstruct and rebuild a self-organising tissue from first principles A thread🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.orgMinimal essential requirements for neural tube self-organisationThe reliable generation of diverse cell types in precise proportions is essential for the formation of functional tissues during embryonic development. Three-dimensional organoid models derived from p...

Marco Grillo reposted

A gentle reminder that if your customers are scientists, your products and claims will be extensively (and rightfully) scrutinized.

Sholto David@sholtodavid.bsky.social

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

Marco Grillo reposted

of many projects Craig Venter led, of personal significance was the fly genome, a unique and i think unexpected collaboration of his company Celera Genomics and the BDGP, led by my pd advisor Gerry Rubin. the power of a shotgun sequenced metazoan, benchmarked to a physical map, transformed genomics.

As mentioned elsewhere, I've been dreaming of solving this problem for a looooooooong time. Nice to see that my dreams were also the dreams of a very talented team! Slightly different approach, same problem, similar logic. Loving this!

Caleb Lareau@caleblareau.bsky.social

We’re unwrapping a new method today at @mskcancercenter.bsky.social. Led by Sydney Blattman, Nabih Maslah, and @austinv11.com with @danapeer.bsky.social, @ronanchaligne.bsky.social and @10xgenomics.bsky.social, we present GIFT: Genotyping In Fixed Transcriptomes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n