Tom Ellis

Synthetic Biology & Synthetic Genomics @ Imperial College London and the Sanger Institute. Bilingual in English and DNA. D-/L-

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

Co-Grown - an exciting biodesign opportunity to work with our lab and our collaborators on materials that grow with self-pigmentation. See below for competition details.

[Yang Liu @YangLiu_LMB]

According to idecRxiv, around 10% of iDEC projects over the past 6 years have gone on to peer-reviewed publication! Some project ideas have also been explored and published by other research groups.

The quality of this year’s student research was just as impressive! I’ve loved spending time with iDEC participants throughout the competition.

[Nature Biotechnology @NatureBiotech]

The November issue is live. This month's special issue focuses on biotech research for climate mitigation and adaptation, with a selection of Perspectives and Comments on how biotechnologies could help tackle the acute challenge facing agriculture and beyond in the coming decades https://t.co/QzCSVAIpZW

[Joy Y. Zhang @ProfJoyZhang]

The World Economic Forum’s new Bioeconomy Policy Index is worth a read. It looks beyond policy ambition to examine how governments translate it into action, where support is concentrated, and where evidence of impact remains limited. https://t.co/qXLCLxfqY8

[International Directed Evolution Competition, iDEC @iDEC2026]

Over the past 6 years, iDEC has grown into a vibrant, accessible scientific community. From all of us at iDEC HQ, thank you to everyone who has taken part and to everyone who has given their time, ideas, or support along the way! #iDEC2026

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Up to 50 people will receive $70k to give away, as microgrants, to create new scientific fields. Good opportunity!

[good papers @paperperday]

Constructing nucleoside deaminase-assisted orthogonal DNA replication system for continuous evolution in prokaryotes

"error-prone DNA polymerase and fused mutators (nucleoside deaminases) achieve targeted hypermutation only on the linear plasmids" https://t.co/EG6nbxGDk7

[Abdul Muntakim Rafi @muntakim_rafi]

amazing work showing that predictions from different tracks of seq2exp models do not reflect a coherent model of transcription

https://t.co/UjyAdcbwNX

[Will Ratcliff @wc_ratcliff]

2/ Since 2018, our lab has been exploring how dumb clumps of cells evolve into functionally-integrated organisms through long-term experimental evolution. We finally have a website for our project: welcome to the MuLTEEverse!

https://t.co/MG9UieLJrT

[International Directed Evolution Competition, iDEC @iDEC2026]

At iDEC, we’ve always believed that the greatest prize a science competition can offer is a story you get to live: what you dared to create, how you found the courage to keep going, the friends you made, and the dreams you chased together. Thank @ProfTomEllis , @chang_c_liu !

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

Great talk from @chang_c_liu at the @iDEC2026 festival finals at Cambridge today. Amazing to see how to engineer cells and experiments to maximize the success of directed evolution.

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

https://t.co/qh1KIq3Fuv

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

Nearly 17 years ago I joined @ImperialBioeng to lead a research group in synthetic biology. And tonight, 7 years after it was meant to happen (covid 👀) I finally got to give my professorial lecture and was honoured to have so many amazing past group members come back for it 🫶.

[Eryney @eryney_ok]

I’m actively looking to match ambitious scientists with funding.

Through some combination of my writing, podcasts, in-person events, scientific research and other activities that my friend @markwbudde would call “hypernetworking,” I’ve managed to meet a lot of wealthy individuals interested in funding ambitious scientists. I’ve had my own work funded this way, and though it’s not sustainable enough to replace the work of larger funding bodies of the NIH, for the right kind of person it is just what they need.

I am writing this post because I am helping one of these groups – Fulcrum Science – find projects worth giving money to.

While I’m pretty flexible, I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who are actively working on open sourced LLMs for frontier biology.

Plenty of groups have shown what is possible with frontier, closed-source LLMs. I’ve also seen it in my own work (which I hope to talk about soon). I also think that the absolute frontier of intelligence isn’t required to do interesting things in science.

I’d like to help match an existing lab – academic or industry – with a decent sum of funding to showcase what open sourced models can do in biology.

Pitch me what you’d do.

Please note, I am not looking to hear about any projects that involve Claude or ChatGPT for any reasoning, experimental analysis, or embodied automation stuff. Open source only!

I’m also open to hearing about other things within biology. If you have an idea you have struggled to get funded, and you have a good reason for me to believe you, please reach out.

My email is eryneym [at] https://t.co/LFSC13FgpH. You can also DM me on Twitter.

[International Directed Evolution Competition, iDEC @iDEC2026]

🏆 The iDEC Festival 2026 Awards Ceremony is almost here! Join us in Cambridge/Online on 8 Nov to celebrate our teams and hear inspiring lectures from two iDEC pioneers: @ProfTomEllis and @chang_c_liu
📅 15:30–17:30
📲 Register via the QR code!
#iDEC2026 #SynBio

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

@ewjwallace @WillPVGreen @ncimb @NCYCyeast I’ve ordered from both. Good experiences. Unfortunately journal reviewers seem to always ask us to use ATCC

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

Nice artwork

[Roman Jerala @rjerala]

Appropriate introduction for the keynote talk at the Applied Synthetic Biology conference #ASBE8 in Manchester in a beautifull Whitworth gallery.

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

@ceronifranci Thanks Franci. I got a much bigger turnout than I expected - now I wish I'd also emailed a few others who are further away like @O_Borkowski to invite them too!

[Kotaro Tsuboyama @KotaroTsuboyama]

We can now design all kinds of fancy de novo proteins. But can we produce them at scale, at a reasonable cost, and without extensive optimization? That’s what got this project started. Our preprint is now out! Much of the work was led by Selena @sesameandrea  and Kaori. 1/8

[Dr. Catharine Young @DrCatharineY]

Best tweet of the night