Mohamed Soufi

Bluesky: Interested in synthetic biology, synthetic cells, and cell-free ribosomes| Paris-Saclay MS| Caltech B.S. BioE & CS minor

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@HelmanDaniel @NikoMcCarty It's analagous to assembling a computer from prebought components. Yeah each part can't work on it's own, but you didn't build it from "scratch"
But the paper you sent is really interesting, that must have been a crazy thing to see back in 1970.

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@HelmanDaniel @NikoMcCarty I think by creating life from scratch, he's talking about creating life from chemical building blocks. Something like this: https://t.co/PUdVuhw9Ii
The paper you sent reassembles amoeba by extracting their cytoplasm, membrane, and nuclei, but you couldn't make them from"scratch"

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@danielmisrael good take

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@NikoMcCarty talk to Professor Rhiju Das, he wants to do this with an RNAzyme one day

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Scientists have created a synthetic cell that can eat, grow and reproduce. The lab-made cell, called SpudCell, could help researchers better understand the basic building blocks of life. https://t.co/VNw61gFWYo

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@slavov_n I really like this "follow up" from Prof. Kording, where they actually try and do it rather than offer the thought experiment. Has anyone done anything else more recently using more recent AI tools? https://t.co/32TiZMfIGX

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@Cesiboy1 @imperialcollege @ImperialSci @buildacell @SynCellEU Is this only open to UK residents?

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@matthschwa Great work! How far are we from large ribosome subunit biogenesis in PURE?

[SynBioBeta @SynBioBeta]

DNA assembly has been stuck at ~1-in-10 error rates.
Genyro’s new Nature paper reports ~1-in-1,000,000 accuracy—unlocking repetitive and GC-rich genomes that were previously impossible to build.
This is how biology becomes programmable. Meet Adrian and Kaihang at SynBioBeta 2026, May 4-7 in San Jose. https://t.co/aooc2uvR2W

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

A long standing goal in synthetic biology is ‘PURE makes PURE’ - effectively the start of self-replicating biology in a tube from just adding biochemicals and DNA instructions. This looks like a promising breakthrough from the Maerkl lab. 👀

[SynBioBeta @SynBioBeta]

Big news for the future of biotech infrastructure. @Ginkgo Bioworks is partnering with the Department of Energy and PNNL to build some of the nation’s first fully autonomous microbial labs, powered by AI, robotics, and next-generation automation. From the Genesis Mission executive order to a $47M contract for M2PC, this is the strongest federal signal yet that autonomous labs will become core scientific infrastructure. Full article here. https://t.co/cdrGXAiPAn

Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬. https://t.co/ogrqWu4QM5

[Daniel Israel @danielmisrael]

I wrote a blog post: The Parallel Decoding Trilemma

Parallel decoding research has tried to optimize the speed-quality tradeoff, but I believe quality should be decomposed into fluency and diversity.

[Daniel Israel @danielmisrael]

"An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing."

✨📝 Planned Diffusion 📝 ✨ makes a plan before parallel dLLM generation.
Planned Diffusion runs 1.2-1.8× faster than autoregressive and an order of magnitude faster than diffusion, while staying within 0.9–5% AR quality.

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@chofski @iA Hmm, what are some philosophical foundations for other older engineering and science disciplines? I draw many analogies from computer science to syn bio

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@chofski @iA Similar to the Fryman quote “what I can’t build I do not understand”. That’s why I think synthetic biology should build cells/biology from scratch rather than build on top of natural systems

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@ATinyGreenCell It’s an acquired taste for sure, but one engineers won’t be used to. An interesting question is whether it’s something that all future engineers in biology will have to deal with?

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@ATinyGreenCell What excites me now is building synthetic cells from the bottom up, in hopes that we can better routinize synthetic biology, and to better reverse-engineer natural biology. That problem excited me more than working as a jr software engineer

[Mohamed Soufi @msoufi_bioe]

@ATinyGreenCell As someone who was picking between software or syn bio career, I think engineering biology needs to be more routinized, and we're not there yet. There's a lot Peter Thiel and I disagree on, but he gets a lot right about why investors/individuals prefer software over biotech.

[nature @Nature]

US National Science Foundation announces lowest number of Graduate Research Fellowship Programme recipients in 15 years.

https://t.co/1KMemtLI07

[Zhigang Suo @zhigangsuo]

Early-career scientists consider careers outside America, a new poll by Nature says. https://t.co/Mo72B0PGfH