Synthetic biologist @ MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Building programmable biosystems for lab evolution, RNA technologies, and living biosensors. Co-founder of iDEC.
When we talk with AI researchers, one question comes up most frequently: do you have datasets focused on mutations at key protein positions? Until now, building libraries for that usually meant a lot of DNA synthesis. We developed HGT-DGR as a faster and cheaper way to make them.
bioRxivpreprintContinuous target-specific mutagenesis and rapid gene evolution by diversity-generating retroelements in Escherichia coli https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.21.739853v1
Excited to share this work—we’ve been waiting a long time for it. Can DGRs become a practical platform for continuous evolution? Without HGT, mutant cells do not accumulate efficiently. We developed HGT-DGR to solve this problem. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Continuous target-specific mutagenesis and rapid gene evolution by diversity-generating retroelements in Escherichia coliSequence-programmable directed evolution systems have great potential to accelerate bioengineering. Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are natural hypermutation systems widely distributed in pr...www.biorxiv.org