Ivan Liachko 🇺🇦 @ivanliachko.bsky.social

Announcing the winners for the "Fast Biology Bounties." I ended up giving away ~$15,000 for 20 projects after reading 430 submissions from 335 individuals. Many winners were "highly generative," meaning they sent me 3-5 excellent ideas and were glad to have them shared freely and openly. There were some major failure modes, too. Some ideas surfaced repeatedly, but I didn't do a good job of connecting "like-minded" people. I'll fix this next time. Also, I managed everything manually using my personal email. This was tedious, and I'm working on building a platform that will automate a lot of this. I'd like to send feedback and scores for every submission in future contests. Many more details in my blog post, which breaks down all the numbers, what I learned, and highlights some of the winners. Some people who I gave money to: - Sebastian Cocioba for a laser-based PCR thermocycler, in which infrared heating replaces aluminum blocks. - Bryan Duoto for writing and publishing a colony-to-sequence cloning workflow that uses magnetic beads and Nanopore sequencers. Scientists can verify clones in 1–3 hours instead of waiting overnight. - Jeff Nivala for an idea to synthesize proteins directly from DNA, without relying on any RNA intermediates. - Sierra Bedwell for a clever automation system that uses off-the-shelf parts to screen thousands of environmental DNA samples in parallel. - Xavier Bower for "IceCreamClone," an interactive cloning strategy ranker that looks at a scientist’s available “parts,” or sequences, and then determines whether they ought to use Gibson, Golden Gate, restriction digest, or another strategy to assemble them together. The software also catches likely cloning errors and estimates the cost and time required for each option. - Andres Arango for multiple ideas, including using antifreeze to accelerate DNA ligation by 2-3 orders of magnitude, and an idea for computationally designed protein cradles for expressing membrane proteins in E. coli.

Remember, you can still go to jail in NYC for exhibiting a ballet or puppet show from a window. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Does anyone know why math nerds are so good at coming up with evocative terminology? It seems like more of a wordcel thing but somehow the shape rotators never miss