Welcome to all new students who join us for the 2024-2025 academic year at X-Institute. Looking forward to new year full of research adventures and discovery.

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Excellent qBio 2024 conference in Shenzhen! Miles work had a nice reception and we meet many new collaborators based in the Greater Bay Area and beyond.

Can we do scientific research by playing games with microbes?

Looking forward to our summer school track on biotic games. Inspired by the works of pioneers like Raphael Kim, Roland van Dierendonck and Riedel-Kruse among others we will explore mutating Open Science Hardware into biotic game consoles.

In the mosaic image above, the “game over” subpanel is meant as a homage to these people (see https://www.opencell.bio/news/biotic-gaming-month for image credits).

For this summer X-Camp we plan to explore life over land and under water while using DIY microscopes and computer vision to learn from microbes about collective intelligence.

Our Frontiers Research Topic on Spatial Ecology of Cells Living in Micro-Structured Environments is finally published.

Among them a Biological Dome to colonize Mars, a Slime Mold robot as well as a Slime Mold based organ bio painting.

Finally! After a lot of work Kevin’s paper Spatial biology of Ising-like synthetic genetic network in BMC Biology!

Bi-stable (2-state) synthetic genetic networks running on round E. coli cells are coupled to other neighboring cells in a quasi-2D colony growing on agar using quorum sensing auto-inducer molecules. Left, you see bacterial colonies and on the right we see the Contact Process Ising Model (CPIM), a model of our exsperimental system. Top, Ferromagnetic interactions and Bottom Anti-Ferromagnetic .

We had a nice workshop to explore the role biotechnology can play in helping humas expand to space. We played with Physarum spatial computing and with microfluidics with highschool students from Shenzhen.

Long time not posting lab news. COVID made us focus on other things and we forgot to keep up blogging. After some time in Chilean Patagonia, and then in Szeged Hugary many news have accumulated. Most importantly all people related to the lab made it through the epidemic safely.

Student Graduations

Miles is now a Postdoc in the US and his thesis work “Ecological succession and the competition-colonization trade-off in microbial communities” is published in BMC Biology.

Kevin is also now a Postdoc working at the Active Matter Physics group in University of Chile. Janneke and I are currently in Shenzhen China having the time of our lives; more on this soon!

Science Workshop

At Rural School G45 of Puerto Bertrand in Chilean Patagonia, together with “Los Guardianes del Baker” we researched the collective intelligence of the microbes living in the locality. We sample the environment and build synthetic ecosystems to observe them with Open Science Hardware machines we built together.

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Awesome way of starting 2021 while celebrating that Miles was awarded a James S. McDonnell Foundation’s 2020 Postdoctoral Fellowship Award to study Dynamic and Multi-scale systems. The JSMF Fellowship is $200,000 USD to be expended in no less than 2 and no more than 3 years and we have no doubt Miles will make an incredible contribution to science with these funds. Miles, you made us all proud! Now Miles can go wherever he wants to pursue postdoctoral research and continue his great work linking theoretical ecology and bacterial biophysics.

We are super pleased to learn today that Simon’s latest manuscript,  Do microenvironmental changes disrupt multicellular organisation with ageing, enacting and favouring the cancer cell phenotype? , was recently accepted for publication in BioEssays!