Leopold Parts
Faculty in Generative and Synthetic Genomics at Wellcome Sanger Institute; CTO (part-time) at ExpressionEdits. Engineering DNA in mammalian cells to understand and build.
- Reposted by Leopold PartsShare insights on using multimodal biological frameworks at #BiologyAtScale26 🧬 Contribute towards multidisciplinary knowledge exchange, and bridge gaps across genetics, cell biology, and human health. 📅 29 June -1 July 2026 Submit an abstract by 20 April ➡️ bit.ly/4mYud02 #ComplexTraits 🧪
- Reposted by Leopold PartsNew preprint on technologies to scale up CRISPR screens. We use them to map 665,856 pairwise genetic perturbations and outline a path to comprehensive interaction mapping in human cells. We also introduce an approach for cloning lentiviral libraries with billions of elements.
- Reposted by Leopold PartsLooking to start your lab in generative biology / AI? Come join us at the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social Sanger is core-funded so you can generate data at scale to train the next generation of models and understanding. Design/Engineering/Chemistry/Proteins/Pathways! pls RT tinyurl.com/GenGenFaculty
- Reposted by Leopold PartsSomatic and germline mutational processes across the tree of life biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
- Reposted by Leopold PartsAre you interested in biodiversity genomics? Fantastic opportunity to join us as a Group Leader at the Tree of Life Programme, @sangerinstitute.bsky.social. 👇 sanger.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/Wellco...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsNew preprint from our lab, spearheaded by @maelledaunesse.bsky.social and in collaboration with Diego Villar! In which we ask, can we detect joint signatures suggestive of positive selection on transcriptomes and epigenomes?
- We've just released our new preprint! 🐀✨ doi.org/10.1101/2025... How do gene expression and regulation evolve during adaptation? And how can we tell adaptive shifts apart from simple drift? @camilleberthelot.bsky.social 👇 A short thread on what we found in African mole-rats.
- Reposted by Leopold PartsA key step towards human genome synthesis. With thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social @mrclmb.bsky.social #SynHG doi.org/10.1126/scie...
- Reposted by Leopold Partsplease share this postdoc job alert! come join the budding Biodiversity Cell Atlas initiative as a postdoc or senior postdoc at @sangerinstitute.bsky.social working closely with @arnausebe.bsky.social and me to make progress on what we cover in this paper www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Claudia Feng's Ph.D work is now out, co-led with @brittavelten.bsky.social and @steglelab.bsky.social . Large-scale CRISPRi perturbations in genetically heterogenous iPSC lines, with single cell readout - enjoy :)
- Happy to see this out now in Cell Genomics: A genome-scale single-cell CRISPRi map of trans gene regulation across human pluripotent stem cell lines: www.cell.com/cell-genomic...
- Reposted by Leopold Parts
⚠️New study: we mapped DNA-binding of topoisomerase TOP2B in cancer, uncovering surprising hotspots of DNA damage. TOP2B, normally essential for DNA stress relief, can act as a double-edged sword. co-led by @LiisUuskula @ChristianLee, out now @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... [1/7] - Reposted by Leopold PartsReally pleased to share the first paper to come out of the lab. We found that hospital patients were frequently colonised with P. aeruginosa and that the same clone was shared between the gut and the lung. The phylogenies indicate that the clones moved from lung->gut www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsNew paper “Proteome-wide model for human disease genetics” is now live at Nature Genetics: rdcu.be/eRu7K popEVE (pop.evemodel.org) finds the needles in the haystacks of human genetic variation:
- Reposted by Leopold Partsfinal week to apply for @sangerinstitute.bsky.social PhD programme (due Nov 27th) -- free to apply, open to anyone anywhere, and a superb training opportunity for students interested in genomic approaches applied to biodiversity, pathogens, vectors, and of course us pesky humans.
- Reposted by Leopold PartsWe are looking for a postdoc to join our team! If you're interested in translating a cutting edge genomics technology (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) to real-life applications in hematology, this is for you. We offer a unique working environment ON THE BEACH: recruitment.crg.eu/content/jobs...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsOur new preprint is online! Viruses, bacteria and parasites use effector proteins to evade immunity and rewire host cell pathways. Together with @AlexanderStark8, we wondered if we could systematically map what these effectors, regardless of their origin, do in human cells. 1/8
- Reposted by Leopold PartsMajor new direction in the lab: hacking human cell biology with pathogen effectors (eORFs) - amazing collaboration with @miketilapia.bsky.social lab. Huge congrats to first authors Tomas & He & all co-authors! Check out the pre-print on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsJoin us and these amazing speakers next March'26 at Synthetic Biology for Health and Sustainability - an international conference held at the Wellcome Genome campus near Cambridge UK. Abstracts deadline: December 1st, 2025 Register here - x.com/gallowaylabm...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsCongratulations @hilarycmartin.bsky.social from @sangerinstitute.bsky.social on being awarded the 2026 Balfour Lecture!
- Reposted by Leopold PartsCongratulations to Richard Durbin on being awarded our Genetics Society Medal!
- Reposted by Leopold PartsNew paper on everyone’s favourite topic, QC! We show why you should do genotype-level QC on your WGS data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Very real quotes about this paper - “The most exciting, mind-blowing paper of the year!” “On a par with Fisher 1918” “I read it every night. Just so beautiful”
- tinyurl.com/GenGenFaculty GenGen is hiring group leaders! If you want to generate data at scale to train the next generation of AI models to make molecular biology predictive and programmable, we want to hear from you.
- New 🧬✂️ pre-print! We show that paired prime editing can efficiently generate large deletions — even >1 Mb — with high precision and at scale. We use this to perform the first pooled prime deletion screen across the human genome. 🔗 biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread (by Juliane Weller)👇
- We still don’t know what most of the human genome does. To figure that out, we need to delete big stretches of DNA, thousands of times. But classical CRISPR creates toxic double-strand breaks that introduce measurement noise. That’s where paired prime editing comes in.
- We first tested the limits of deletion length for prime editing by screening >3.8k deletions of up to 1.2 Mb in a reporter locus. Efficiency was best for <5 kb deletions, but even megabase-scale ones worked at single-digit rates, to our knowledge, the largest prime-edited deletions ever reported.
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View full threadOverall, we showed that paired prime editing can generate ultra-long deletions, and that it can be used to interrogate the genome in a pooled manner - ultimately promising to unlock functional secrets from all the gigabases of our genome.
- Reposted by Leopold PartsThe "High-Content CRISPR Screening" conference will take place on March 18-19, 2026, in Vienna, Austria. Don’t forget to register and submit an abstract! Conference website: perturb2026.bio Meet the Speaker: @leopoldparts.bsky.social
- Reposted by Leopold PartsTF-MAPS: fast high-resolution functional and allosteric mapping of DNA-binding proteins by @XianghuaLi2 Are Transcription Factors really 'undruggable'? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsPlease RP! A 4-day synbio and tissue engineering conference #MASSIV to transform biology and medicine together. Couldn't list all amazing speakers, so please check out this 👉https://www.massivconference.com/ Poster due is Nov 7, but will be extended. With @stemcellnetwork.ca and JST.
- Reposted by Leopold Parts🎉 New in #GENETICS: Functional Genomics & Systems Biology section! Highlighting cutting-edge studies on molecular networks, systems-level insights, and innovative methods. Read more: buff.ly/wWVZdrS%F0%9...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsCelebrating the first 1000 genomes of Lepidoptera in Europe, sequenced at @sangerinstitute.bsky.social in collaboration with sampling hubs across the UK via the DToL project www.darwintreeoflife.org & across Europe via @projectpsyche.bsky.social www.projectpsyche.org & @10klepgenomes.bsky.social
- Reposted by Leopold PartsWe've been screening across many DNA construct structures with variable number/size of interesting regions - e.g. spacer, extension and barcode for prime editing. There wasn't a widely used tool to process these complex structured reads so I ended up developing github.com/allydunham/d....
- Reposted by Leopold PartsOur latest work is out in Nature today. In this paper, we introduce an improved version of NanoSeq, a duplex sequencing protocol with <5 errors per billion bp in single DNA molecules, and use it to study the somatic mutation landscape of oral epithelium in >1000 people www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsHappy to share that this work together with @opentargets.org is now out at Nature Communications.
- Out now in Nature Comms: the largest trans-eQTL meta-analysis in a single cell type! An Open Targets team led by Krista Freimann and @kauralasoo.bsky.social analysed 3,734 lymphoblastoid cell line samples across nine cohorts, identifying four robust loci www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsAre you an AI expert who wants to stay in academia and change the world by understanding the most complex things we know - living organisms? Want to lead your own group, based in Heidelberg DE, working language English? @embl.org is hiring in AI embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsGenomics continues to revolutionise science. But there’s untapped potential for new discoveries through collaboration between genomics and the humanities, social sciences, bioethics and wider stakeholders.
- Reposted by Leopold PartsCan you find therapeutic targets for cardiomyopathies using simple, clean genetics in a human cell line? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsDoomscrolling pause to chat CRISPR libraries! Preprint describes our new, data-driven approach to combine on-target and off-target predictions much more intelligently for *selecting* guides, which we use to develop our newest Cas9 knockout library, Jacquere. Thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsVery proud of our paper on "scrambling-by-hopping" LADs, which was just published: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Congrats to Lise Dauban and the rest of the team – this was a real tour-de-force!
- Reposted by Leopold Parts"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.
- Reposted by Leopold PartsExtremely proud to see this work led by @mihkeljesse.bsky.social now out on biorxiv!
- After 1.5 years of work in @kauralasoo.bsky.social’s lab, we finally published my preprint! We introduce gpu-coloc, a GPU-accelerated implementation of coloc, show comparability to CLPP and aim to provide practical guidelines. Now accessible on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsI've reached 100 British springtail species! This was helped by a recent glasshouse sampling trip, where I added these 4 species. 3 are now in the pipeline to have reference-quality genomes sequenced for the first time, by the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social. More info in the thread below! 🧵1/7
- Reposted by Leopold PartsMonumental effort from @maxbillmann.bsky.social and colleagues, quantifying genetic interactions among 4 million human gene pairs. Lots of features associated with genetic interaction & GI degree conserved from yeast. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsRecruitment is now open for the EMBL-EBI–Sanger Postdoctoral Programme. ESPOD builds on the collaborative relationship between EMBL-EBI and the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social, offering projects that combine experimental and computational approaches. www.ebi.ac.uk/research/pos... 🧬🖥️🔬#postdocjob
- Reposted by Leopold PartsWe are hiring a scientist to lead our 'Build' team at the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology. @alleninstitute.org Job posting below: alleninstitute.org/careers/jobs... Please reach out if you have any questions!
- Reposted by Leopold PartsNew paper from our lab on synthetic genome work in yeast is out - Iterative SCRaMbLE for Engineering Synthetic Genome Modules and Chromosomes. Exciting project led by Jane (Xinyu) Lu in our group, now online. t.co/0LuGwgAWlA
- Reposted by Leopold PartsOur paper is now out in final form at Nature Genetics! For those who missed the preprint, we used large-scale Perturb-seq targeting transcription factors to push primary fibroblasts into diverse transcriptional states, including those observed in cell atlas studies.
- Reposted by Leopold Parts🎲 Our paper on the genetics, energetics, and allostery in proteins with randomized cores and surfaces is out today @science.org! 🧬 By charting a protein’s sequence universe, we could rationalize which versions were kept through evolution – and why many stable ones were not.
- Reposted by Leopold PartsNew preprint: Allostery is a widespread cause of loss-of-function variant pathogenicity by the great @xt117.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsExcited to launch our AlphaGenome API goo.gle/3ZPUeFX along with the preprint goo.gle/45AkUyc describing and evaluating our latest DNA sequence model powering the API. Looking forward to seeing how scientists use it! @googledeepmind
- Reposted by Leopold PartsNew preprint - collab with the groups of @mehurles.bsky.social and @dr-appie.bsky.social. We imputed missing fluid intelligence test scores into ~170k @ukbiobank.bsky.social indivs & showed how this reduces bias and increases power for rare+common variant analyses. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Studying the genetics of intelligence measures can help us understand the neurobiology of cognition and neurodevelopmental conditions 🧬🧠 We estimated missing intelligence test scores in @ukbiobank.bsky.social to reduce bias and boost power. Preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread 👇
- Reposted by Leopold PartsThe evolution of allostery in a protein family. Aina's new preprint containing seven complete comparative allosteric maps biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsOur manuscript on how single-cell imaging of protein dynamics of paralogs reveals sources of gene retention is out in iScience with a great team of collaborators @leopoldparts.bsky.social @guilbourque.bsky.social www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsWhich RNAs are functional? Been a long time goal of @deboramarks.bsky.social to start an RNA sequence —> function and structure mapping. Huge thx to team for pushing on this when - led by Rohit Arora and Murphy Angelo for seeing this thru and Pascal Notin for pulling together!!!
- Reposted by Leopold PartsDelighted that the 'flagship' manuscript on our @genesandhealth.bsky.social 44k exomes (British Pakistanis & Bangladeshis) is now preprinted. Great academic-industry collaboration. Lots of new associations (mostly additive, a few recessive) and new insights into homoz knockouts & drug discovery.
- Preprint alert! 🚨 doi.org/10.1101/2025... Our manuscript on Exome sequencing and analysis of 44,028 British South Asians, using @genesandhealth.bsky.social is now available at @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social! We present several great results, and I’m thrilled to highlight the pieces I worked on:
- Reposted by Leopold Partstree of life core lab has put together such a manuscript, detailing a lot of information on the lab work needed for reference genomes for biodiversity which you can find here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Leopold PartsHow to find Evolutionary Conserved Enhancers in 2025? 🐣-🐭 Check out our paper - fresh off the press!!! We find widespread functional conservation of enhancers in absence of sequence homology Including: a bioinformatic tool to map sequence-diverged enhancers! rdcu.be/enVDN github.com/tobiaszehnde...
