molpigs, The Molecular Programming Interest Group, is an international group of researchers interested in topics such as molecular programming, DNA computing, and other aspects of biomolecular nanotechnology. We host regular seminars, poster sessions, journal clubs, send out newsletters, and host a forum for discussion and fostering collaboration.
Hello and welcome back to the molpigs newsletter! Feel free to hang out at the molpigs Forum! We are also on twitter!
All the past podcasts and tutorial can be found here. You can also now find our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Amazon, Stitcher, TuneIn, and more (as well as manually in your favorite podcast client with our RSS feed)! Enjoy!
If you haven’t yet signed up to the newsletter for our sister project, the Molecular Programming Society, which is currently writing the grassroots textbook the Art of Molecular Programming, you’re missing out! Sign up now!
- Recruitment
- Coming very soon—Chat with Prof. Damien Woods!
- Job Advertisements!
- Seeking feedback!
- Interested in helping out, sharing something interesting, or have an idea for something we could do?
1. Recruitment
We are looking for a new member to join our team! As part of the team, you would get to be one of the regular hosts of our podcast series, as well as influence other activities we do and the direction of the community. If you are interested in joining the molpigs team, please submit your application here!
Thank you Anastasia for being such a great part of the team! We wish you luck with your next steps!
2. Coming very soon—Chat with Prof. Damien Woods!
The “Meet the Molecular Programmer” podcast series focuses on casually chatting with professors about their academic and life experiences. We believe that their research can be easily accessed, but the experience behind and wisdom obtained during the path is more valuable and worth sharing to younger students. For our previous “Meet the Molecular Programmer” podcast series, please check it here.
We had a great chat with Prof. Damien Woods, stay tuned for the podcast release!
3. Job Advertisements!
- GenScript is establishing a new unit to make chromosomes and euchromatin for GenScript, and has three open positions:
- Nanovery has an open position for a DNA nanotechnologist.
- Evonetix is a growing biotech company which is set to revolutionize de novo gene synthesis, as needed to facilitate the fast-growing and incredibly exciting field of synthetic biology. Their technology integrates novel molecular biology methods and microfluidics with a novel silicon array capable of independent control of many thousands of miniaturised reaction sites. This allows massive parallelism of the DNA synthesis process and on-chip gene assembly with integrated error removal.
Their community is a closely-knit multidisciplinary and multicultural team of biologists, physicists, chemists and engineers.
They have closed their $30M Series B funding round and moved to a state-of-the-art facility in central Cambridge, allowing them to undertake significant recruitment to enable the development of their commercial desktop gene synthesiser.
The Biology team in Evonetix has open positions:
- Automated Gene Synthesis Senior Scientist/ Scientist and Research Associate
- Enzymatic Gene Synthesis Technical Lead in Protein Engineering
- Formulation & Quality Control Senior Scientist/ Scientist
- Molecular/ Synthetic Biology and Integration (Senior) Scientists: This role would be well-suited to PhDs or post-docs with a background in experimental DNA nanotech.
4. Seeking feedback
Hello molpigs subscribers, we are enthusiastic about improving, and making molpigs better! We’d really like to get your feedback on what you like and what we could be doing better. We’ve made a feedback survey, it’s a little long but feel free to only answer the questions you want to/can answer.
5. Interested in helping out, sharing something interesting, or have an idea for something we could do?
If so, please get in touch with us! Shoot us an email at contributions AT <this domain>, there are loads of ways you can get involved, and many we haven’t even thought of, but here’s a few ideas of what you could do:
- Be a guest on our podcast series: you can talk about anything vaguely related to the field, whether it’s comments on life as a student/researcher, some thoughts you’ve had about the field, some interesting work you want to share, or if you want to speak out about something like mental health, this is the perfect place to do it!
- Present a poster-podcast! This is something we’re very excited to try out, and we hope you feel the same: the idea is to try to explain something (it doesn’t have to be your own work) within a 20-30 minute podcast, with the challenge that all reference material needs to fit into a poster format.
- Want to advertise something on our newsletter? Perhaps you’ve just passed your thesis defense, or are looking for a team for a hackathon, or have a job posting to share, or have just written a blog post you think might be of interest; whatever the case we’d love to help you share the good news!
- We’re also open to more conventional seminar-esque things like talks or journal clubs.
We’re looking forward to getting to hear from you, and getting to know you better!