SIMB Notebook: The Frontiers of Protein Engineering

The Society for Industrial Microbiology (SIMB) annual meeting in Austin the first week of the month was great fun.  I caught up with two Warpers, saw some other contacts from that era and met a bunch of new friends.  Plus I showed the flag for autonomous laboratories with a talk in a session on applying AI to the field - and got a chance to talk to multiple users of our systems at customer sites. Murphy's law struck in that our PR on four academic placements of autonomous labs came out about 20 hours after my talk.   In addition to the  session I appeared in, I attended a keynote on protein engineering, a session on enzyme engineering, and a whole day of talks on natural product research - plus all the posters.  I have a few notes that are maddeningly incomplete & I apologize in advance for the quality of attributions.  But here are a few observations on the space on protein engineering, which I am trying to level up to "barely dilettante" grade.

HiFi's Not Very Pacific Waters

PacBio had a major shakeup early this month. First came a large round of layoffs, which caught several individuals who were very much the face of innovation on social media.  Next came the sudden retirement of CEO Christian Henry, who has appeared in this space multiple times, and the elevation of CFO Mark Van Oene to the top seat.  

When PCR Gives You Lemons...

I wish to highlight an interesting new preprint from a group at Danish Technical University which explores the schmutz in PCR reactions, demonstrates some surprising conclusions, shows how their results might be very relevant to a common use of amplicon sequencing, and demonstrate a specific utility running PCR on in cases where typical PCR absolutely can't succeed.  Put another way, how often do people patent what was previously considered uninteresting experimental artifacts?