We are excited for many apps of Foli-seq in academia & industry. Please reach out to collaborate! Lots of exciting projects in this space for students & postdocs. Led by Yiming @yiminghuang.bsky.social and Yiwei @yiweisun.bsky.social & thanks to all our collaborators!
@columbiasysbio.bsky.social

In 💩 samples from patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) from the @crohnscolitisfdn.bsky.social, we can distinguish different patient cohorts with increase clinical severity of disease and stratifying biomarkers that associated with immune pathway involvement.

Each day, humans shed billons of host cells from the gut lining out of the body (our "exfoliome") via our poop. Foli-seq unlocks this non-invasive exfoliome analysis to assess gut and immune functions, and links with the gut microbiome, all w/o colonoscopy or tissue biopsy. 💩🧬

also, an excellent perspective by @dbikard.bsky.social summarizing the work! 🙏
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We are hiring PhD & Postdocs in this space so please reach out if interested. Also check out the Gordon Research Conference on Microbiome Editing in Jan 11-16, 2026.
www.grc.org/microbiome-e...

This new work in commensal microbes and our other recent work to engineer pathogenic bacteria to reduce virulence in the gut are greatly expanding our toolkit for in vivo microbiome editing. 🛠️🧬🦠
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Led by the stellar Diego Gelsinger @drgel.bsky.social working with many contributors through a wonderful long-term collab w/ Sam Sternberg & Ivo Ivanov labs! 🤝 @columbiauniversity.bsky.social
@columbiasysbio.bsky.social

Congrats Bryan!!

I hear ya! I mean more on the “we” rather than “I” personally in some of these sentiments. Again, this is not meant as a substitute for things we do or aught to do already but something that can augment. Also, just an idea to stimulate conversations.

I like your ideas, just trying to think of ways that I can donate my “time” to help specific labs/areas that might even be outside of my immediate area of expertise. Seems like having a universal currency for science might have some uses. It’s obviously imperfect, but maybe could refine the ideas.

I think the idea is that you can compensate others with your credits/tokens like pay for reagents (service contracts on equipment!!). There are lots of misc expenses in running a lab that add up!

May not push the incentives to a point where people will review more, but at least extend the effort of the review to benefit not only the authors (or the journals) but broaden impact to others through the peer review process. It’s like volunteering time and using earned credits to give to others.

Looks like there is some momentum to this concept: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The problem is that people don’t have time to review. It’s not clear how you easily “fact check” papers in bio (unless there are massive flaws). Critiques of strengths & weaknesses are still useful. Most people aren’t volunteering time to review biorxiv papers. Maybe this system can be an incentive.

Credits used back to invest in science community rather than on direct personal benefit.

I recognize that this idea is still underdeveloped but wanted to start share it here. Would love to hear feedback and find people willing to help do something like this! Thanks for reading! (9/9)