Maor Knafo
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maorknak.bsky.social
Maor Knafo
@maorknak.bsky.social
Postdoc at Ziv Reich's lab, Weizmann Institute of Science. Studying phenotypic variability and biological learning.
MaorKnafo.com
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The 60s were a weird time, and no one was weirder than a group of scientists studying the transfer of memories via cannibalism in flatworms.

A new blog post in praise of cellular learning!

www.maorknafo.com/reducible-be...
Memories all the way down. — Maor Knafo - System Biology
Could memories be an emergent cellular property ? The 60s were a weird time, and no one was weirder than a group of scientists studying the transfer of memories via cannibalism in flatworms. Flatworm...
www.maorknafo.com
Science, at its best, is just a bunch of people saying, “Look at this crazy shit!”
At its worst, it’s someone saying, “But what’s the mechanism?”🧪
November 13, 2025 at 12:07 PM
This is the pipeline I've built and use to find crispr targets on weird organisms, if anyone is looking for one:
github.com/maorkn/CRISP...
GitHub - maorkn/CRISPR_HUNTER: scripts for genric crispr desgin
scripts for genric crispr desgin. Contribute to maorkn/CRISPR_HUNTER development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
November 11, 2025 at 4:23 PM
The 60s were a weird time, and no one was weirder than a group of scientists studying the transfer of memories via cannibalism in flatworms.

A new blog post in praise of cellular learning!

www.maorknafo.com/reducible-be...
Memories all the way down. — Maor Knafo - System Biology
Could memories be an emergent cellular property ? The 60s were a weird time, and no one was weirder than a group of scientists studying the transfer of memories via cannibalism in flatworms. Flatworm...
www.maorknafo.com
March 12, 2025 at 9:19 PM
This is an image that has haunted me since I was a child because it captures something truly inherent to the human experience. We can get used to anything. A new blog post about habituation—it's been a while, needed to get un-used to a few things. maorknafo.com/reducible-beau…🧪
February 18, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Waddington's landscape contamination in the lab today!
🍄📷🧪
June 17, 2024 at 3:34 PM
A new #preprint! Variability is strange, right? Especially when it arises in the background of an identical genetic background. Why would cells, having the same machinery, regulation, and environment, behave differently? Why would there be #noise? 1/13 rb.gy/45y36m
December 12, 2023 at 12:51 PM
Terrarium going a bit crazy these past weeks. Constantly changing. 🍄📷
October 6, 2023 at 8:21 AM
ganoderma sp.? 🧪🍄📷
"What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive"

Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?
September 28, 2023 at 3:30 PM
Guys, guys, am I just seeing things or is this a budding yeast cell???
Great song BTW 🧪🍄
September 22, 2023 at 4:27 PM
Mine is kinda long... But beautiful.
September 19, 2023 at 1:10 PM
Starting to look like autumn (finally). False parasol? 🧪🍄
September 19, 2023 at 1:02 PM
🧪🧪New blog post!
How (and why) do organisms optimize tasks, and why are they flat about it? The use of Mutual Information in Pareto fronts and slimy aliens.🌌👾📊
maorknafo.com/reducible-beau…
In the comments, I'll link to the previous posts, which I think are helpful (and cool😆).
September 14, 2023 at 4:46 PM
🧪New Preprint!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Is microbiome surveying accurate? Meaningful? Robust? For the most part, the answer is sadly underwhelming, especially for those working in undersampled niches. 1/8
September 13, 2023 at 7:24 AM