Congrats to the team led by Zhengyi and Maolin for developing a new strategy for the photoenzymatic stereoablative enantioconvergence of γ-chiral oximes (. See news release:

Congrats to Nilmani, Steve, Tianhao, Jingxia, Adrianna, and Ocean for developing an AI-powered autonomous protein engineering platform (. See news release: .

Exited to learn that my NSF global center proposal was selected for funding (. With this grant, we will be able to collaborate with researchers from other countries to establish standards and metrics for biofoundries and democratize biofoundry.

I am very pleased that NSF is now investing in biofoundries after we established the first integrated biofoundry in the world more than 10 years ago (. Also see News from UIUC (.

Engineered enzyme flirts with fluorine via @cenmag.

Congrats to the team led by Maolin who developed an exciting new-to-nature enzymatic process to selectively incorporate fluorine motifs into functional molecules (.

RT @ACSSynBio: We were delighted to present Prof. Dr. Randall Platt with the ACS Synthetic Biology & AIChE Young Innovator Award 🏅. Congrat….

It was nice to attend another AI related expo in the same building after attending an expo for all 24 NSF AI institutes last September. Enjoyed talking to staff from various lawmakers’ offices to promote the emerging AI+Robotics+SynBio area.

Thanks to the hard work by Daniel, Zhixin, Nilmani and Jingxia, a simple strategy has been developed to create a Cas12a system that outperforms the most widely used Cas9 system. Also see news release:

Congrats to Hengqian, Chunshuai, and the team for discovering and characterizing a novel bioactive RiPP-fatty acid hybrid molecule (. This work has opened a new avenue for finding novel bioactive RiPPs (.

RT @ACSSynBio: #WeekendReading from #ACSSyntheticBiology!. This Editorial from Hector García Martín, Stanislav Mazurenko, and EiC Huimin Zh….

We have developed a powerful computational tool to identify proper chromosome integration sites for genome editing in virtually any organism (. Warmest congratulations to the team led by Aashutosh!

RT @CABBIbio: ✳️ Watch iBioFAB in action! ✳️. The Illinois Biological Foundry for Advanced Biomanufacturing at @IGBIllinois accelerates bio….

Congrats to the whole team led by Maolin! After more than one year’s waiting, our manuscript describing a repurposed photoenzyme with new-to-nature reactivity was finally published.

RT @CABBIbio: A #CABBI team from @ChBEIllinois used light-powered enzymes to modify azaarenes — molecular puzzle pieces crucial to many eve….

Inspired by the pioneering work of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine, we developed a new strategy to create mRNA vaccines (. This work was built on our previous unexpected discovery of Z base in DNA (.

RT @CABBIbio: In a breakthrough for eco-friendly chemical production, a CABBI team at @UofIllinois and @Princeton developed an economical w….

Hearty congrats to the whole team for developing this organic acid biomanufacturing pipeline (. This project was started almost 10 years ago.

Congrats to Meng and the rest of the team for developing a powerful tool to identify genetic elements that can stabilize heterologous gene expression in mammalian cells (and .

RT @CABBIbio: Using light to activate natural enzymes can help scientists create novel reactions for ecofriendly biomanufacturing.♻️.CABBI'….