This is a legitimately amazing paper. TL;DR: They made a microfluidic chip that can trap a million individual cells, hooked it up to a microscope, and used it to connect genetic circuits --> single-cell behaviors. Say you want to build a complicated gene circuit, like an oscillator with a period of six hours. Normally, you’d make a design, put it into cells, watch it fail, redesign it, and try again. With this system, you can instead make a million variants in a single tube, introduce them into cells, and trap those cells in the chip to see which designs work. You can then pull out a “winning” cell using optical tweezers, or identify which gene circuit it received via in situ sequencing. (Each circuit carries a short genetic barcode. You sequence the gene circuit variants beforehand to link each barcode to a design. Then, reading those barcodes inside the chip, using in situ sequencing, tells you which circuit each cell received.) This is a much more scalable way to test and optimize complex ideas in synthetic biology; not only gene circuits, but perhaps also metabolic pathways. I suspect it’ll be super useful for collecting data for predictive AI models, too. Congrats @NoahOlsman!

Life updates: @AsimovPress is officially back, with a renewed focus on original reporting and arguments in biotechnology. Also, we'll be helping (some) scientists launch philanthropic funds around the ideas published in the magazine with @RenPhilanthropy. More on this soon!

InnerPlant is a really interesting company. They make soybeans that encode a fluorescent protein, which gets “switched on” anytime the plant is infected with a pathogen. You can’t see the fluorescence by eye. But if you fly a drone overhead, mounted with a hyperspectral camera, then you can pick up signs of infection weeks before the plants show visible symptoms. The soybeans are planted in one-eighth acre "sentinel" plots, next to normal crops, and then used to monitor the whole field.

Biotechnology can be used to build many useful things. This is clearly apparent in agriculture; just look at productivity metrics since the Green Revolution. The USDA has approved more than 120 gene-edited or GMO plants, at least 10 of which are grown commercially — including corn, soybean, cotton, canola, alfalfa, potato, and apples. Over 90% of all acreage of corn, soy, cotton, canola and sugarbeetin the US is engineered, mostly for herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Engineered microbes can arguably do *more* incredible things. They could be used to break down plastic in the environment, or to sense pollution in water. They can even be engineered to detect landmines and emit a signal that is visible from drones flying overhead! And yet, zero engineered microbes have been approved by the EPA for release outside of containment, and then commercialized. The EPA has reviewed hundreds of applications for engineered microbes, but only made one approval (that we know of), in 1997, for a microbe that wasn't ultimately commercialized. There are a few engineered microbes on the market, though. ZBiotics sells an engineered B. subtilis that breaks down acetaldehyde, thought to drive hangover symptoms, but that's a probiotic regulated by the FDA. Pivot Bio also sells gene-edited microbes that fix nitrogen. These microbes are now sprayed on millions of acres of farmland each year. But they didn't go through the EPA's release pathway either; the company found ways to do the engineering to avoid that regulation. In other words, all the grandiose ideas in biotechnology that you hear about — like releasing engineered microbes to sense pollutants, break down plastic, etc — have not, and probably will not, get regulatory approval for environmental release. The EPA regulations are too onerous and vague. So why are regulations "navigable" for engineered plants, but not for engineered microbes? In my interview with Yonatan Chemla, he gave some thoughts: 1. The agricultural lobby is much bigger, and there's high commercial upside for engineered crops. 2. Crops are visible! We can see them, and so regulators feel like their policies can actually be enforced. Microbes are (mostly) invisible, so it's hard to know if they're spreading etc.