Last Sunday, @AsimovPress published an article explaining why it's so hard to diagnose tuberculosis.

Here are 10 interesting things we learned about TB while editing it:

1. TB (not malaria) is the deadliest infectious disease. It kills >1.2M people each year. 2. At its "peak" in the 19th century, TB killed 1-in-4 people in Europe and America.

It killed Chopin, Thoreau, Kafka, and Eleanor Roosevelt. The disease was dubbed "the white plague," as it made victims pale.

(Edvard Munch painted his sister, who died of TB at the age of 15.)

This is an ongoing thread for my series, "30 Essays to Make You Love Biology." ❤️🧬

I'll pin it on my profile. Day 1. "I should have loved biology," by James Somers.

https://x.com/NikoMcCarty/status/1819765395806695588

There were an insane number of "big" biotechnology papers published this week.

The Bridge RNA gene-editing papers are important. But here are 7 more advances.

Many new CRISPR tools, epigenetic editing for prion disease, gene drives for plants & more...🧵 1. Bridge RNAs are a programmable DNA editing system that can insert, delete, and flip DNA sequences.

A compact, flexible genome engineering tool.

https://x.com/pdhsu/status/1805981296276955571

My last tweet about China:

In Shanghai, I visited BluePHA, a synthetic biology startup that uses engineered microbes to manufacture biodegradable plastics.

They make ~5,000 metric tons/year, have products available on the market, and are scaling to 50,0000 tons/year. 🧵

BluePHA makes PHAs, a type of polyester made by many organisms in nature. The company can mold these PHAs into lots of different plastic products, such as cups (right) or spools of thread (left) to make bags and clothes.

Cells are fast and crowded places. Numbers help us make sense of them.

Here are five of my favorite "bionumbers."

1. ATP synthase spins 134 times/second. That is much faster than the propeller on most piston airplanes, and about half the r.p.m. of a Boeing 737 jet engine. 2. An mRNA is (much) larger than the protein it codes for.

A single nucleotide of RNA is 3x heavier than an amino acid. Three nucleotides are required to encode each amino acid; not to mention the untranslated regions, polyA tail, and so on.

(Sources are in image descriptions.)

Water accounts for about 70% of a cell's mass.

But, interestingly, there are many water-dwelling, photosynthetic microbes that express GAS VESICLES. These are protein compartments, filled with gas, that help the cells float up or down in water to capture sunlight.

A visual ode: Heinrich Klebahn, a German microbiologist, was first to discover gas vesicles amongst some cyanobacteria that he collected from a lake.

Without x-rays, high-powered microscopes, and fancy research equipment...

How would you figure out the size of a single molecule?

Lord Rayleigh did it way back in 1890, using little more than oil, water, and a pen. His inspiration? Benjamin Franklin.

My favorite experiment.🧵

I first learned of this experiment as a student at Caltech.

Rob Phillips teaches Franklin's experiment to demonstrate the power of "order of magnitude" thinking, and to show how simple calculations can reveal hidden truths.

He wrote about it here: arxiv.org/pdf/1703.02066…

🧬8 Free Courses to Learn Synthetic Biology

Yesterday, I gave my ten book picks. Today, it's all about online videos and lectures.

Here are my recommendations, in order of increasing difficulty: twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1. What is Synthetic Biology? By @EngBioRC.

A high-level & approachable introduction to the field, with links to excellent essays and videos from George Church, Andrew Hessel, Suzanne Lee, and other pioneers.

ebrc.org/what-is-synbio/

🧬📚 10 Books to Learn Synthetic Biology

The field is so broad and moves so fast — DNA synthesis, gene circuits, protein design! — that it can be hard to know where to get started.

Here are the books that I recommend, in order. 🧵 twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1. The Machinery of Life
By David Goodsell

To engineer biology, you first need to understand its basic contours: How DNA, RNA & proteins work together to coordinate the behaviors of a cell.

This book is a gentle, visual introduction.
amazon.com/Machinery-Life…

🧬 30 Days of Great Biology Papers.

From the origins of the genetic code to pioneering work on circadian rhythms...these are my favorite snapshots from the history of biology.

All the papers — and explanations — in a single thread: 🧵 Day 1

"Thoughts About Biology," James Bonner, 1960.

https://twitter.com/NikoMcCarty/status/1667183941856501761

David Goodsell's paintings beautifully depict proteins and living cells.

Here's how to visualize a protein in this style. In under 5 minutes.🧵 The first image, above, is Cas9. Some domains are highlighted.

The second image is by David Goodsell.

Step 1. Download PyMOL. It's free for the first 30 days, at least.

pymol.org/dokuwiki/doku.…

There have been an incredible number of gene-editing advances (including in delivery) over the last three days.

Here are 7 of them...🧵 1. Start with delivery.

Feng Zhang's group developed "programmable" injectors that can deliver protein payloads in mice + human cells with "efficiencies approaching 100%"

Delivered Cas9 & base editors. You've probably already seen this one on Twitter.

nature.com/articles/s4158…

🖭🖭 A Brief History of Parafilm 🖭🖭

"Cling wrap on steroids." "Duct tape of science." "The forbidden lab cheese." Parafilm has many names.

But what is this stuff? Where did it come from? And can you actually eat it? 🧵

cell.substack.com/p/parafilm Despite a booming number of memes, the history of this wonder material is shrouded in obscurity.

To understand parafilm, we must go way back — 200 years back — to the dawn of paraffin and oil wells.

https://twitter.com/ParafilmM/status/1528117958979031040

The wacky history of glow-in-the-dark plants 🌱

A few years ago, "Glowing Plants" raised $484,000 on Kickstarter. Backlash followed and the platform banned gene-editing projects.

The original company died in 2017, but others took their place.

These are the highlights. 🧵 Our story begins in molecular biology's golden era, 1986.

A small cadre of biologists & chemists at UCSD reported, in @ScienceMagazine, the "stable expression of the firefly luciferase gene in...transgenic plants."

The results were impressive.

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

🧬Making DNA: The Quest for Synthetic Life

We're in the midst of a revolution in DNA synthesis.

But biology's grand plans — synthetic life, a solarpunk future — are hindered by major tech flaws & laughable biosecurity.

Read the 6,800 word essay.🔻
cell.substack.com/p/dna The story of DNA synthesis begins in 1972.

A biochemist in Wisconsin, H.G. Khorana, built 77 bases of DNA using chemistry and his brain.

He extended the sequence to 207 bases. The synthetic DNA worked in living cells. It took 200 person-years of work. doi.org/10.1126/scienc…

AI has changed writing forever.

Tools to start a one-person (science) newsroom: 1. Find a paper to write about.

Use Explain Paper (@explain_paper) to understand the research. Highlight confusing passages and get an explanation.