Devon Stork
storkdevon.bsky.social
Devon Stork
@storkdevon.bsky.social
Scientist, synthetic biology. Nonprofit cofounder. I edit microbial genomes and take lots of notes. Writer on the side.
Reposted by Devon Stork
By this time next year, either:

🏆 we'll have engineered PETase enzymes actually work industrially & recycle plastic

... or we'll know that AI-for-proteins is still a bit underbaked 😜

Excited to see what happens!!!! 😬

Spread the word ⬇️
1/4
🚀 Announcing the 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament.

This year’s challenge: design PETase enzymes, which degrade the type of plastic in bottles. Can AI-guided protein design help solve the climate crisis? Let’s find out! ⬇️

#AIforBiology #ClimateTech #ProteinEngineering #OpenScience
July 8, 2025 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Devon Stork
Heads up: terraforming Mars isn’t just sci-fi, it’s a real possibility that’s possible with today’s technology.

Mars could be green in MY lifetime. 🚀 🌼

What’s stopping us? We need a lot more real research into how to do it right. Don’t nuke Mars!

👇
May 13, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Devon Stork
Can we do BETTER than evolution with the help of AI? It starts with data. 🧬 🔢

Check out @pioneerlabs.bsky.social's breakdown of how we get large-scale, high-fidelity data out of every engineering and evolution experiment!
May 9, 2025 at 2:03 AM
I went to the 2025 Symposium on Biomaterials, Fuels and Chemicals with an invitation from @nils-averesch.bsky.social to speak about our work at @pioneerlabs.bsky.social engineering organisms for sustainable biomanufacturing on Mars! I took 80 pages of notes. docs.google.com/document/d/1...
May 9, 2025 at 12:50 AM
Reposted by Devon Stork
🚀 New proposal from Align! The experimental platform aims to standardize #microbial #phenotyping & support predictive modeling. 🦠 Capturing data across 1k strains & 1k conditions; using BacterAI; generating high-quality datasets for ML @jensen_lab
Genotype to Phenotype: Design of an Extensible Experimental Platform for Characterizing Microbes
zenodo.org
March 13, 2025 at 8:58 PM
Ever wonder how we’ll unlock Mars as a living world? 🌏 In our substack post we break down the 'red planet recipe'—the chemistry of mars soil — for growing life on another world. Dive into the science to find out more!
Check out 🏆A Biologist’s Guide to Mars Dirt, where we present a receipt for soluble Mars Regolith Media (sMRM) that best simulates what you’d get if you added water to Mars dirt.

Will anything grow in this media? Stay tuned!

💧+ 🪨 → 🌱 ?

open.substack.com/pub/pioneerl...
🏆 A Biologist’s Guide to Mars Dirt
Just add water
open.substack.com
December 10, 2024 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by Devon Stork
The next Alphafold2 will be a predictive model of protein expression. I think it's possible, and @alignbio.bsky.social is going for it! 🧬

Every single protein engineering project I have ever worked on at one point or another ran into expression issues. 😠 It can't come soon enough! 🙏
🚀 News from Align! Today, we're sharing our proposal for building a predictive model of protein expression. Check it out here! ➡️ https://buff.ly/3OqtPZf ⬅️

🌍✨#ProteinExpression #Bioengineering #Collaboration #MachineLearning #DataScience #AlignToInnovate
December 3, 2024 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Devon Stork
💡💥Here’s a modest proposal I’ve been pondering for a while on how to change the PEER REVIEW process and start more community-driven SCIENCE FUNDING. Lots of feedback/discussion welcomed! Other variants of the idea might exist already—not claiming originality. (a long 🧵) (1/9)
November 30, 2024 at 5:14 AM
I just read the Evo paper www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... from the @arcinstitute.org and have some thoughts. Tl;dr: I can see this being a fundamental part of the future of biology, but this paper is light on experimental data and I don’t think many of their demos are very interesting. 🧵
Sequence modeling and design from molecular to genome scale with Evo
The genome is a sequence that encodes the DNA, RNA, and proteins that orchestrate an organism’s function. We present Evo, a long-context genomic foundation model with a frontier architecture trained o...
www.science.org
November 22, 2024 at 12:01 AM
Reposted by Devon Stork
Want to follow along as we engineer microbes for circular biomanufacturing in space? We're launching open science updates through our substack! ⬇️
November 20, 2024 at 12:32 AM