Thomas Gorochowski

Applications for the $75,000 Hyperspectral Biology microgrants close on Friday, July 10. I'll try to make all decisions by July 14th. For 400 years we studied organisms up close through light microscopes. Today, hyperspectral cameras let us see biological signatures that are otherwise invisible. We're building this field of "hyperspectral biology," using hyperspectral cameras + machine learning + living organisms to monitor entire ecosystems from the sky. I'd like to support small experiments that: Collect data on the spectral absorption of molecules, develop low-cost hyperspectral cameras, and develop algorithms to improve signal processing of faint signals against backgrounds. Consider applying! And if you have any questions, you can always DM me here and I'll do my best to reply. (Image below is from Pixxel, a company that launches hyperspectral satellites.)

The 2026 BCL Lab Retreat was one to remember with the team enjoying everything Cheddar Gorge has to offer above and below ground! Hoping the aesthetic of engineered living materials embraces the slow growing rock structures of the depths.

New book chapter: "How to Weigh a Cell." This chapter explains how scientists have weighed cells throughout history, often using simple equipment and back-of-the-envelope calculations. It has lots of interactives, so you can "repeat" the experiments directly in your browser.

Quickly grabbing a coffee before this year's Workshop on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications in Glasgow. Excited to share some of our research and learn more about this community. I'll do my best to live tweet the talks! #mbmc26 mbmcworkshop.org/2026/

Knowledge preservation in the era of big science and AI: strategies for sustainable scientific research. Via @Nature doi.org/10.1038/s41467…

@timd_ca Do you sell super-hi-res images for framing? Would love some of these for my lab walls!

A snapshot of the molecular machines that enable thought

Beauty should be a core pursuit of biotechnology. There should be companies and nonprofits that engineer organisms solely for the sake of crafting beautiful things. A few reasons why: 1/ Biotechnology has historically worked in reductionist ways, but many useful functions only emerge at the systems level. By engineering a systems-level outcome, like beauty, we will get much better at engineering organisms in predictable ways. When I say "reductionist," I mean that most useful things in biotechnology (drugs and tools) were discovered by stripping molecules from their natural contexts. Scientists collect organisms from soil or wherever and then study their molecules in isolation. This basic approach has yielded everything from rapamycin to antibiotics and CRISPR. This reductionism, though, means that that we know disturbingly little about how life actually works at a systems-level. My core argument is that, by studying beauty, we can remedy this. Beauty has persisted through tens of millions of years of evolution because it is functional; bright colors help attract pollinators to a plant, for example, which helps the plant breed. If evolution has created all of this beauty for functional reasons, then it stands to reason that by trying to create **new** forms of beauty, we'll be able to discover and understand how these systems-level functions work! Indeed, we may even be able to create entirely new functions that biology hasn't evolved yet. These functions will not possible to understand via isolated molecules or reductionism. Therefore, a company pursuing engineered beauty for the sake of beauty will probably make many fundamental discoveries about how organisms develop, interact, adapt to their surroundings, and so on. 2/ Beauty is a way to grow the field and bring more people into biotechnology. Nick Desnoyer’s flower design work, for example, has probably reached hundreds of thousands of people. The glowing plants from Light Bio, too, were featured in the mainstream press. You may not think that these examples are “important” for the universe relative to, say, an incrementally better cancer therapeutic, but there’s no question that they are way more popular to mainstream audiences and good, overall, for the field. 3/ The market is huge! Breeding is already widely used to engineer beauty, or at least to select for aesthetic preferences. Pugs are evolutionarily suboptimal, but they've been bred precisely to satisfy a certain aesthetic desire are now a multi-billion dollar industry. The Juliet Rose, developed via breeding over a 15-year period, debuted at the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show and is enormously profitable today. Why should deliberately engineered forms of beauty be any different? If you are building a biotech company or nonprofit that is pursuing beauty, please reach out! I’d love to help.

I’m looking for a co-founder. Frontier labs are over-refusing legitimate bio work because they can't tell who's a real researcher and who isn't. I’m solving this with BioTrust — building the credentialing layer between frontier AI labs and researchers. Strong early interest from frontier labs. Backed by funder Sentinel Bio. I am looking for a builder who's run the trust and security backbone at a company in identity, fintech, compliance, health data, or cybersecurity. Someone with strong instincts on the trust-vs-friction calls. Finisher energy. Deeply motivated by mitigating catastrophic risk from AI and biology. Full context and how to reach me here: docs.google.com/document/d/1UB… Tag the people you know who'd be unreasonably good at this.

🤖📚🧪#AI is having such a big impact on #synbio and science more broadly. Check out our latest perspective "Knowledge preservation in the era of big science and AI" on this topic that emerged from a workshop led by Penn Rainford a year or so ago! doi.org/10.1038/s41467…

Made it to @SynBioBeta after very little sleep and this things is huge! First time, so if genetic design and unconventional computing and new approaches to bioengineering are your jazz, give us a buzz.

We then leveraged TRADE editing to "capture" entire pathways in vivo and move them between species without ever needing to extract their DNA--just molecular biology accomplished fully within the microbes. This allowed us to move functions across phyla.

So ready for this: Interspecies Protocols from @longnow Needed now more than ever! longnow.org/labs/001/3/?ut…

@hhlee I'd prefer a series: like X-Files, but less scary.

I wish this was a full length feature film to highlight the scientists and engineers behind the scenes willing progress forward.

@richnanophd @AdrianWoolfson @andrewhessel Thank you! We were so happy when the images came through. The nanoscale world is a sight to behold.

@chofski @AdrianWoolfson @andrewhessel Stunning AFM images! The 'doodling' approach to kilobase-scale de novo synthesis is elegant. Beautiful integration of techniques! #synbio 🧬🥳

🧬Want to synthesise kilobase-scale DNA? We got you covered!🥳 In latest from the lab we explore the "doodling" capabilities of DNA polymerases and ways to guide the sequences produced. Loads of data + beautiful AFM of the molecules themselves. #synbio ... doi.org/10.1038/s41467…

Work emerged from discussions with the wonderfully creative @AdrianWoolfson and @andrewhessel, with Sim and Thea doing the heavy lifting in the lab. Would love to build a team to take this towards programmable DNA printers and I'm sure doodling plays a role in evolution! #synbio

There are no words.

You hate markdown but you love agents. This is agentdoc github.com/citizenlee/age… Internally used at @CultivariumFRX but looks like a problem many people have.

This paper is top!

Applications close March 31st.