Calin Plesa (@calinplesa) header
Calin Plesa (@calinplesa) profile picture

Calin Plesa

@calinplesa

Assistant Prof. @UOKnightCampus. Cofounder @SynPlexityDNA. Protein engineering, gene synthesis, synbio, nanopores, multiplex assays. Opinions my own.

 Eugene
plesalab.org
Joined March 2012
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New lab preprint: if ML struggles with extrapolation, let's expand the diversity of training data with gene synth, DNA shuffling, and ML gen.... also lots of #FluorescentProteins #ProteinEngineering #MachineLearning #SyntheticBiology 1/n
bioRxiv Synthetic Biology (@bioRxiv_synbio) profile picturebioRxiv Synthetic Biology@bioRxiv_synbioMar 3
High Diversity Gene Libraries Facilitate Machine Learning Guided Exploration of Fluorescent Protein Sequence Space biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… #biorxiv_synbio
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Incredibly proud of our small team, with just 30 months from incorporation to acquisition! So much hard work and creativity went into getting here. Super excited to join the GENEWIZ team and scale what we’ve built. Lots more to come!
SynPlexityDNA (@SynPlexityDNA) profile pictureSynPlexityDNA@SynPlexityDNAOct 30
SynPlexity is now part of @AzentaSciences! Thrilled to join forces and scale our gene library technology through @GENEWIZSciences to help more scientists build and test at scale. investors.azenta.com/2026-10…
Azenta Announces Strategic Investments to Advance the Next Generation of GENEWIZ Gene Synthesis...

Azenta Announces Strategic Investments to Advance the Next Generation of GENEWIZ Gene Synthesis...

Exclusive licensing agreement with Elegen and acquisition of SynPlexity strengthen gene synthesis capabilities, expand high-throughput discovery workflows, and position GENEWIZ for long-term...

investors.azenta.com
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We have two faculty positions open in synthetic biology (one experimental and one computational), both very broadly defined. Deadline is Oct 31. The Dept of Bioengineering in the Knight Campus at UOregon is a great place to work. Come join us! Link below.
Image from Calin Plesa (@calinplesa)
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Calin Plesa retweeted
Calin Plesa (@calinplesa) profile picture
Calin Plesa@calinplesaSep 10
Replying to @KevinKaichuang
We've addressed this at @SynPlexityDNA. At scale our price goes below $1/gene. We've shipped out >200,000 genes just in the past month.
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Nozomu Yachie (@nzmyachie) profile picture
Nozomu Yachie
@nzmyachieAug 10
We just posted a new preprint on a microRNA (miRNA)-responsive CRISPR guide RNA: the cuffed guide RNA (cgRNA). biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… Here’s what we did 🧵
Image from Nozomu Yachie (@nzmyachie)
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Cool preprint. Rather than engineering TdT around reversible terminators, they use the natural sugar specificity of an RNA polymerase to achieve terminator-free, template-free single-nucleotide addition...
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Still not a full synthesis cycle but it feels like one of the more interesting new directions in enzymatic DNA synthesis space. researchsquare.com/article/r…

A 3′ terminal sugar-specific polymerase for terminator-free single-nucleotide extension of RNA...

Extant single-nucleotide extension (SNE) methods for oligonucleotide synthesis rely on terminator-modified substrates, which require complex nucleotide synthesis and induce side reactions that...

researchsquare.com
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Tom Ellis (@ProfTomEllis) profile picture
Tom Ellis@ProfTomEllisJul 18
Fun paper - by looping mRNA into circles they trap ribosomes to go round and round synthesising very very long proteins. They even get E.coli and B.sub to secrete these monsters. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Synthesis of Ultra-Large Fibrous Proteins from Bacteria via a Looped-Translation System

Synthesis of Ultra-Large Fibrous Proteins from Bacteria via a Looped-Translation System

High molecular weight fibrous proteins such as silk, elastin, and collagens, are fundamental for providing shape to macroscopic biological structures, yet their recombinant production remains...

biorxiv.org
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We’re looking to recruit a postdoc to work on developing genomic language models. We’ve been spending the last few years developing new multimodal sequencing methods for sequencing and assembling new genomes (paper soon) — the ultimate pretraining data. Email me at [email protected] if interested
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Looking for a synthetic biology faculty position? Come talk to me at SEED 2026 about upcoming opportunities at @UOKnightCampus #synbio #SEED – at Denver, CO
Image from Calin Plesa (@calinplesa)
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Sudarshan Pinglay (@sudpinglay) profile picture
Sudarshan Pinglay@sudpinglayJun 4
How much of the human genome is essential? Two pieces out today from our lab: 1) a method to map essential genomic intervals at gigabase scale, and 2) an argument that it's time to consider synthesizing a minimal human genome. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
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We just preprinted DropSynth-Gold where we replaced PCA with Golden Gate Assembly (GGA) inside emulsion droplets, extending multiplexed gene synthesis to ~3 kb constructs assembled from up to 12 fragments while preserving the scalability of DropSynth. 1/n
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more replies
Many GGA library assembly methods are limited by the number of orthogonal junctions that can coexist in a shared reaction. DropSynth-Gold performs each assembly in its own droplet. Library scale is determined primarily by barcode diversity, not junction diversity. 5/n
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We're still pushing DS on length and scale with lots more in the pipeline. In the meantime, check out the preprint for more details on DS-Gold: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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Harris Wang (@harriswangnyc) profile picture
Harris Wang@harriswangnycApr 30
1/ Excited to share our new paper in Science: “Toward life with a 19-amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design.” @ColumbiaSysBio @ColumbiaBME @Columbia science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… 🦠🧬🛠️🖥️💥
Toward life with a 19–amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design

Toward life with a 19–amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design

Because all known living organisms are made from at least 20 canonical amino acids, the feasibility of life using a more simplified alphabet remains unclear. In this work, we leveraged computational...

science.org
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Vivek Mutalik (@vivek_mutalik) profile picture
Vivek Mutalik@vivek_mutalikApr 3
🥳 Huge preprint 🔔 Today we share something our group has been working toward for a long time, led by @LucasMoriniere We asked can we predict which receptor a phage targets from its genome sequence alone? For most phages, we couldn’t. So Lucas set out to do something crazy!
Image from Vivek Mutalik (@vivek_mutalik)
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Ryan Boileau (@bffswithbiology) profile picture
Ryan Boileau
@bffswithbiologyMar 4
Aaaand it’s online ahhhhh!!! 🥳🥳 So excited!! The first glimpse of my postdoc work with @chorye @dukecagt. Here, @stefanmgolas and I developed TurboPRANCE, an open-source robotics platform for rapid and scaled phage-assisted continuous evolutions. 🧪Tweetorial party!👇1/n
biorxiv_bioengineering (@biorxiv_bioeng) profile picturebiorxiv_bioengineering@biorxiv_bioengMar 4
An autonomous system for multi-objective continuous evolution at scale biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… #biorxiv_bioeng
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