Aidan Tinafar • cell-free.com

@BrianRoemmele If you humanize something, please make it dignified. I think I would be okay with fetal position when unboxing a new humanoid robot, but open to ideas.

This robot packing themselves in a suitcase gives me the ick.

@thisischristina Life is the reason to exist

Life doesn’t need a reason to exist

@Avi_Marcus cortisol

If you could design a biosensor for any small molecule or protein what would you target?

@cyantist @drmichaellevin

Who are the best people in the world right now studying or writing about consciousness?

@josiezayner Depends on the subfield. Some areas are streamlined, but others require building your own infrastructure to make any progress. Unlike software, biology still lacks true abstraction layers - there’s very little ‘AWS for biology’ despite recent claims.

Is biotech really that hard to understand for those not in the industry?

@kirk3gaard Sales incentives are structured very poorly in biotools.

Who is teaching sales departments that the best way to sell your products is to have people contact a person rather than just clicking buy? (I assume Amazon has the "Buy now" button for a reason...)

@garrytan 💯

Oppose asset seizure taxes everywhere Buy/Borrow/Die tax is the way to close a tax loophole instead of unrealized gains and asset seizures that trigger the end of productive investment

Single-cell manipulation with laser-powered microbots using elastic nanorods and laser tweezers. [🔬 Szeged Institute of Biophysics, Hungary]

@DdelAlamo Could it be that DNA they considered here is mostly in double-stranded form (~linear) and that RNA is most single-stranded and has complex secondary structure of its own?

What is it about protein-RNA structures that makes them so difficult to predict compared to protein-DNA structures? It genuinely looks like there is nothing to learn here. LDDT=0.25 is basically garbage

@BrianRoemmele Why would they not start washing from the top?! 🤔

Send in the drone! Solar panels get dusty. This drone can clean it. Results in more efficiency pays for the drone 2x.

Before and after footage showing the improvement made by Gath, a Parkinson's patient after just two days on a new drug Produodopa treatment, after being diagnosed 12 years ago.

@rasmalai Fortran

@TheCinesthetic City of God

What’s the one foreign-language film you’d recommend to someone who only watches English movies?

@KevinKaichuang At your service!

I need a wetlab so that I can screen my submissions to protein design competitions before submitting

@AdrianoAguzzi Check us out: cell-free.com

@NikoMcCarty You can just use synthesized linear DNA in cell-free. There is no need for cloning. Folding issues are not unique to cell-free systems. Some sequences just don't fold as well as others and/or are less soluble.

How far are we from "protein printers" that enable anyone to make a protein of any sequence on-demand in a couple hours? I'm imagining a box that takes a protein design from a computer and then physically makes it on a bench or desk. This isn't yet feasible. It's still expensive and tedious to make proteins. There are many steps involved. But there are two main ways to make a protein: 1. Order a DNA sequence encoding the protein of interest. Clone the DNA and insert it into a cell-free extract, microbe or other cell line. Coax the cell to make the protein, then purify it. (There is no guarantee that the DNA sequence will even be expressed! And if it is, no guarantee that the protein will fold as anticipated.) 2. Do peptide synthesis. Chemically assemble amino acids into longer chains. The problem here is that there is a particular efficiency of each step, and so it becomes less and less efficient to make longer proteins. A protein printer could work by miniaturizing and automating option #1. Imagine if DNA synthesis costs were significantly cheaper, and if that DNA could be quickly made on-demand. Then, one could make a Protein Printer by hooking up a DNA synthesis box to a PCR machine to a pipetting robot, etc. But I think a better option is to forego #1 and #2 entirely, and find a new way to make proteins. I previously co-wrote an essay on one such approach, in which we imagined a rotary telephone in which all the different codons — AUA, AUG, AUC, and so on — are placed on a single, continuous loop of RNA. The ribosome would then be engineered to ‘hop’ from one codon to the next to build custom proteins (with no DNA synthesis required!). The difficult part of this idea is that there are no good ways to controllably coax ribosomes to hop between codons reliably and at high speeds. The idea was widely criticized, even as some readers told me that they are working on similar ideas. I don't know what a Protein Printer in the future will look like, but I do think it's an important thing to work towards. It would facilitate the democratization of education and local biomanufacturing that I've long dreamt of. There would be biosecurity concerns, of course, but those same concerns also apply to DNA printers (which are already available on the market), and there are ways to safely screen proteins before they get manufactured. For decades, people have argued that "biotechnology is not like computer science." The latter can be done in quick, iterative loops; the former is slow and tedious. A protein printer would help shift this equation, enabling far more people to experiment. Perhaps in the future, people could print their own medicines or vaccines at home. The hit rate of our AI design tools is also improving so rapidly that the need for validating protein designs before they are made will recede. Protein binder design went from a <1% hit rate to rates now closer to 22% or more. I think this "on-demand" protein idea is worth thinking about.

@ATinyGreenCell Can't wait

So excited to see who this soapieboi is!!!

Automated Cell-free Protein Synthesis for Distributed Biomanufacturing medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

@1vnzh This💯

weight of the world feels lighter when I see my customers smile

@TheHubCanada @harleyf @Shopify Spinning up stories is just not enough. Canada needs to have QSBS equivalents and favourable share disposition rules for founders. Grants need to relax their IP domicile restrictions. Companies should have the option to obtain pre-approvals on customs clearances for all exports.

‘We need to reframe our story to focus on what’s possible’: Shopify President @harleyf on how Canada can become a ‘Founder Nation’ This episode was made possible by @Shopify and the generosity of viewers like you. thehub.ca/podcast/video/…