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2024

• April: Welcome to our new MSc students, Sara Najimi, Erik Chen, and Anson Chow!
• March: Mike attended the kick-off meeting for the SigSynCell MSCActions Doctoral Network in Bordeaux, next step recruiting 12 new Synthetic Cell PhD students!
• January: We’re excited to have MSci students Daniel Minamiguchi and Hayden Cheung start in the lab!

2023

• December: Mike presented the groups’ work at a Nucleic Acids Symposium at Imperial College London
• November: Mike presented online at the 3rd International Conference on Nanomaterials in Biology, held in India
• November: Khoa’s paper “Sequence-independent, site-specific incorporation of chemical modifications to generate light-activated plasmids” has been published in Chemical Science!
• November: Mike presented the groups’ synthetic cell work at SynBioUK 2023, in Bristol
• September: We welcome a whole new cohort of PhD (Charlotte, Alex, and Chelsea) and Master’s (Hayato, Hayden, Erik, Sara, and Ting Fund) students to the group!
• September: Mike was invited onto a C&EN and ACS webinar to discuss who might win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023…
• September: Congratulations to Romain for winning a UCL MAPS Undergraduate Innovation and Enterprise Prize for his research project in the group!
• August: Congratulations to Razia for passing her DPhil viva!!!
• July: Jeff and Denis’ paper on “Engineering cellular communication between light-activated synthetic cells and bacteria” has now been published in Nature Chemical Biology!
• June: Congratulations to Denis for passing his DPhil viva!!! – three in one month was a lot…
• June: Congratulations to Khoa for passing his DPhil viva!!!
• June: SynCellEU has written a profile of Mike and the group’s research 🙂
• June: Congratulations to Jack for passing his DPhil viva!!!
• May: Khoa’s preprint “Sequence-independent, site-specific incorporation of chemical modifications to generate light-activated plasmids” is now available on bioRxiv!
• April: We’ve published another paper in JACS on “Orthogonal Light-Activated DNA for Patterned Biocomputing within Synthetic Cells“, led by Denis!!!
• April: Jack and Denis’ paper on “Precise, Orthogonal Remote-Control of Cell-Free Systems Using Photocaged Nucleic Acids” has now been published in JACS!!!
• April: Another paper from Denis on “Handcuffed antisense oligonucleotides for light-controlled cell-free expression“, published in Chemical Communications!
• April: Denis’ paper “Accessible light-controlled knockdown of cell-free protein synthesis using phosphorothioate-caged antisense oligonucleotides” has been published in Communications Chemistry!
• April: Great to have Giacomo stay with us for a postdoctoral position!
• February: Welcome to Charlie Newell, a PhD rotation student from the LIDo DTP!
• January: Here’s a new preprint from Jack and Denis on “Precise, orthogonal remote-control of cell-free systems using photocaged nucleic acids“, now on ChemRxiv

2022

• December: A new preprint from Denis on “Light-controlled cell-free protein synthesis using phosphorothioate-caged antisense oligonucleotides” is now on ChemRxiv
• October: The first Master’s students from UCL have now joined the group. Welcome to Romain, Yuting, and Jonathan!
• September: We’re super happy to welcome the first UCL PhD student to the group, Ina Bradic. Looking forward to seeing the amazing things you’ll do!
• September: A paper we collaborated on with the Di Michele group (Imperial), ‘Reaction–Diffusion Patterning of DNA-Based Artificial Cells’, has been published in JACS!
• September: Excited to welcome Sònia to the group as a postdoc
• July: Denis has preprinted his work on “Blue light-activatable DNA for remote control of cell-free logic gates and synthetic cells” on ChemRxiv!
• July: Jeff’s work on “Engineering cellular communication between light-activated synthetic cells and bacteria” is out as a preprint on BioRxiv!
• June: Mike has written the ‘DNA and RNA sequencing’ Chapter of the 4th Edition of Nucleic Acids in Chemistry and Biology that has now been released!