Calin Plesa
@calinplesa
Assistant Prof. @UOKnightCampus. Cofounder @SynPlexityDNA. Protein engineering, gene synthesis, synbio, nanopores, multiplex assays. Opinions my own.
New preprint! We carried out the largest complementation and inhibition study for diverse homologs in a single protein family (DHFR) to date. Highlights thread follows... 1/n 🧵
Exploring Antibiotic Resistance in Diverse Homologs of the Dihydrofolate Reductase Protein Family through Broad Mutational Scanning biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_synbio
CASP is getting cut by NIH... 😢 (Anyone with extra funds wanna help support perhaps the most important competition of the century?) science.org/content/articl…
Excited to unveil Boltz-2, our new model capable not only of predicting structures but also binding affinities! Boltz-2 is the first AI model to approach the performance of FEP simulations while being more than 1000x faster! All open-sourced under MIT license! A thread… 🤗🚀
Amazing PhD defense by Dr. Natanya Villegas! She pioneered CRISPR-Cas9 and RNA work in our lab and drove multiple tech-dev projects. She is looking for opportunities in the PNW so reach out -> @TrieneToScience
Huge congrats to Dr. Andrew Holston on a successful PhD defense!! Andrew has been working on the large-scale characterization and engineering of chimeric receptor histidine kinases. He’s looking for roles in biotech/academia, let’s connect if you’re hiring! -> @AlkynesOfSci
Have we hit a "scaling wall" for protein language models? 🤔 Our latest ProteinGym v1.3 release suggests that for zero-shot fitness prediction, simply making pLMs bigger isn't better beyond 1-4B parameters. The winning strategy? Combining MSAs & structure in multimodal models!
We unlock breakthrough insights by delivering the best training sets in biology—at unprecedented scale. youtube.com/watch?v=KuCaJT…
Small proteins can be more complex than they look! We know proteins fluctuate between different conformations- but how much? How does it vary protein to protein? Can highly stable domains have low stability segments? @ajrferrari experimentally tested >5,000 domains to find out!
It’s been a tough few weeks. My 10yo daughter was diagnosed with a very rare, aggressive cancer called interdigitating dendritic cell sarcoma (IDCS). I’m reaching out to identify clinicians/patients who have encountered pediatric IDCS, indeterminate dendritic cell histiocytosis…