Very nice. Looking forward to a more detailed read!

Thaaaank you Helena 🙏

doi.org/10.1016/j.ym...

Enjoy the read — and I’m always happy to hear your thoughts or feedback!

Kudos to my long-term friend and collaborator Maren Nattermann and the fantastic team at the Max-Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg for another inspiring collaboration.

Very proud of my former students Jenny Bakker, Karin Schann, and Maximilian Pfeifer Boinot , who carried out this challenging work under constrained conditions in the fading Bar-Even lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam.

We built and evolved a pathway that activates formate, turns it into formaldehyde, and feeds it into metabolism. This shows that we can likely convert RuMP methylotrophs into RuMP formatotrophs through this simple intervention.

“Evolution-assisted engineering of formate assimilation via the formyl phosphate route in Escherichia coli” is now out in Metabolic Engineering.

In our new study we used enzyme engineering and evolution to teach E. coli a new trick: to grow using CO2-derived formate via a fully synthetic metabolic route that nature never tried.

That's a great idea. Wish you a pleasant transition and as said before: tell us where you are heading ;-)