Katie Galloway

🤔How do you design a promoter for stable titration of expression? 💡Try programmable promoter editing with DIAL! 📰Now published at @NatureBiotech 🧵 [1/n] 🔗 below

Most humanities classes don't teach epistemology. Students can take boatloads of humanities and never encounter the idea. Lots of strong feelings about how wrong and rotten this is. I loved studying history, philosophy, art bc I had teachers who helped set up the critical frameworks in high school. In college, this was nonexistent. Everything was just political. Such a disappointment.

@PracheeAC I think it’s worse than that. I think most PhDs are trained by increasingly specialized undergraduate programs with no humanities requirement. It’s not that they’re ignoring epistemology; it’s that they don’t know what that is. Or that science is a branch of philosophy!

Sometimes I wonder how so many PhDs have a massive blind spot for epistemology — because it’s not like we didn’t teach it. So I suspect it’s because we let careerism supplant intellectual curiosity and they no longer give a fuck

We are recruiting! If you are passionate about technology development, protein engineering, computational design, directed evolution, chemical biology - please reach out! (The setting is pretty nice too…)

@NeilShenvi Hope Fellowship in Cambridge. Further out, Hope Christian Church in Winchester (good youth group)

I'm looking for a good church near MIT. Any recommendations?

There's something particularly restorative of the bucolic English countryside in early spring....but now home again where spring is hopefully, finally on its way

Nifty work, @clairebedbrook! Congrats!

@emmapeterman_ Lorena Postiglione on building a controller for gene therapy ##SynBio26

Emma Peterman on building compact, bistable gene circuits @emmapeterman_ #SynBio26

Kicking off at Synthetic Biology for Future Health and Sustainability #SynBio26 @billerbeck_s @ProfTomEllis @marc @barbara_synbio

@srikosuri @rhomsany Congrats!

First in Human! When @rhomsany and I first started Octant, this was the dream. A platform that makes molecules that few others can go after… to get the chance to tackle severe diseases with poor to no standard of care. It's been a long journey but so incredibly proud of the team and thankful to the volunteers who make this attempt possible. We got to celebrate with these new sunhats! octant.bio/news/octant-an…

Apply to join the ISSCR Stem Cell Reports Early Career Editorial team! Current Early Career ditor Nika Shakiba shares how the program offers editorial experience, insight into the publication process & opportunities to shape the field. Appy by 13 March👉 bit.ly/4aGWILr

@ProfTomEllis This is the biohybrid robot of the future! We just need to integrate the coconut tree directly to the vending machine :)

Each drink comes in self-grown carbon negative biodegradable packaging. 🌴

Coconut vending machine. We’re living in 2026.

@XueSherryGao Congrats, Sherry!

Thrilled to share that our lab received a renewal of the NIGMS MIRA35. Excited to keep advancing genome editing, discovering fungal enzymes, and exploring fungal natural products as a rich source of small molecule therapeutics. Looking forward to the next five years!

It was a pleasure to get a tour of @pfizer 's Biotechnology Manufacturing and Develop site in Andover today with my bioprocess student in 10.494A at @MITChemE Thank you Ranga Godavarti and your whole outstanding team for kindly showing us the ins-and-outs of upstream, downstream, and scale up!

Very glad that you like it! It was a very fun and unexpected adventure for us. One thing to note the wpre reduces the effective translation rate. Since RNA levels are in the denominator, the effect isn't necessarily that translation is reduced. Rather I think it's that the RNA levels are higher for the same or similar amount of protein. It could be that the wpre makes the transcripts more stable. These effects might be more obvious if we were passing the cells and looking at long-term expression. But it remains interesting to speculate what exactly the wpre does.

@GallowayLabMIT @threadreaderapp I'm very late getting to this thread but it's a fantastic and valuable story. It's quite surprising that WPRE seems to reduce translation, since people often invoke it as a positive element. Btw the Anakin/Amidala meme is [chef's kiss].

So you want to change transgene expression: just change your promoter, right? Changing the promoter increases RNA and thus protein levels. What more could be happening? [1/n] Well, promoters don’t just set RNA levels; they uniquely transform how RNAs are transmitted into protein levels. 🧵