Zibo Chen

Longer thread later, but if you are designing small proteins or want to building a stability predictor using 1.8 million highly diverse experimental measurements… credit to @ChoYehlin and @KotaroTsuboyama ! biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

I'm very excited to share that I've started a new position as a Group Leader at CZ Biohub NY! @biohub

Could the folding of synthetic gene circuits in 3D shape how genes are expressed? Today @ScienceMagazine we report on the role of gene syntax in shaping feedback between transcriptional activity and genome folding for advanced circuit design🧵 (1/n)

@GallowayLabMIT Congrats Katie, well deserved!

Wild to see this in print for the first time

Join us next March'26 at Synthetic biology for Health and Sustainability Abstracts deadline: December 1st, 2025 Link below 👇 Great lineup of speakers and excellent venue: Kristala Prather (MIT), Luis Serrrano (CRG), Priscilla Briquez (Freiburg), Zibo Chen (Westlake U) @ZiboChen , Tobias Erb (Max Planck), Cleo Kontoravdi (Imperial College), Debora Marks (Harvard), Nicola Patron (U of Cambridge), Sai Reddy (ETH), Anna Rising (Karolinksa), Edda Schulz (Max Planck), Claudia Vickers (Queensland U), Chris Voigt (MIT) @Geneticdesigner, Harris Wang (Columbia)

@MoKhalilLab @BashorLab Huge shoutout to @DamonRunyon for funding this work. And check out this stunning cover art by the unstoppable first author, Xiaoyu, with a Haiku interpretation from Gemini: Small bots read the stone Linked by glowing, sensing wire Many arms see one

@MoKhalilLab @BashorLab We also optimized the code to be fast, so you're not waiting hours to simulate higher valency binding kinetics. Code is available here: github.com/BioProgramming…

Thrilled to share our new paper on MASS (Multivalent Antigen Sensing Simulator)! We built a fast and accurate simulator to calculate multivalent binding KINETICS from monomeric properties, enabling sensing of cell surface antigen types and densities. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja…

@adam_broerman @Nature Congrats Adam, beautiful work.

We sought to make proteins both potent and FAST. We used #proteindesign to design precise control over protein interaction lifetimes, enabling us to construct rapid-response circuits, biosensors, and switchable cytokines. Now published @Nature! Links to paper and tutorial below.

Always fun and enlightening to see a talk by @UriAlonWeizmann

Legend David Baltimore died yesterday. He understood the way things should work: "the real contribution of @MIT is that it doesn't take itself too seriously. It takes ideas seriously, but the people are relatively informal. They are not self-aggrandizing the way academics can be.

@ShiyuXia @UCBerkeley @UCB_Chemistry Congrats Shiyu!

In January 2026, I will be joining Berkeley @UCBerkeley as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, College of Chemistry @UCB_Chemistry, with exciting connections with world-class communities including the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory @BerkeleyLab and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences @QB3Berkeley. Incredibly grateful to all the mentors (especially @ElowitzLab and @WuLabHarvard), colleagues, friends, and family who made this next chapter possible. ❤️🙏 Research directions and student/postdoc opportunities coming soon. Stay tuned! 👀

@SynBioGaoLab Congrats Xiaojing!

Grateful for the recognition and for my team's dedication. When I wrote it in Oct, I didn't anticipate that the title would feel defiant. The original draft even had a now quaint reference to "the comparative comfort of the ivory tower", which was wisely removed.

LIDAR is out! rdcu.be/efugD We've improved a lot, e.g., making MESA-like LIDAR work, RNAseq of on-/off-target editing, and optimizing RNA delivery. We are one baby step closer to making it useful for therapeutics. NIH high-risk high-reward program provides key support.

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT🚨: In a paper out today in @ScienceMagazine we describe a way to build synthetic phosphorylation circuits with customizable sense-and-response functions in human cells. Check it out at science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…. 🧵1/n

@yodai_takei Thank you Yodai! Hope all is well.

@ZiboChen Congrats, Zibo and the team! Great to see the final version!

Excited to finally share Perceptein, a PERCEPtron made of proTEINs: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@RongrongDu123 Thanks Rongrong, the pressure is on you now 🙃

Congrats Zibo and the team!!!

@Ella_Maru Thank you for the kind words, Ella!

@ZiboChen Congratulations, Dr. Chen! Proteins functioning as neural networks? Amazing work!

@Mohamad_Abedi Thanks Mo, always fun to make circuits using de novo designed proteins.

@ZiboChen Congrats Zibo! It is such a powerful and elegant merge between synbio and protein design. I'm excited to see how this grows in your group!