Pioneer Labs

Our team recently put three evolution strategies into a direct competition to see how microbes adapt under Martian-style stress. 🧫⚔️ We tested: • Adaptive Evolution (Natural mutation), • BioBloom (saturating, genome-wide single-mutation screens) • Additive Engineering (introducing entirely new genes via horizontal transfer). All three approaches improved performance, but surprisingly, Adaptive Evolution won the first round, pulling ahead after a month of steady passaging. 👑📊 This comparison helps us understand when to rely on natural mutation, when to engineer new variants, and how to combine them to build microbes that can endure harsh, poly-extreme conditions beyond Earth. 🌌🧬 https://lnkd.in/eKppFTAt

We're hiring for a Lab Manager and an Operations Associate! Join the team 🚀 🌼

For the first time in 30 years, scientists have revisited what it would actually take to terraform Mars. With modern technology, the goal is closer than we thought! At the 2025 Green Mars Workshop, we presented the Introduction to Mars Terraforming, a concise summary of one possible, feasible path to a green Mars consistent with everything we know today. Then we dove into the details with a community of planetary scientists, biologists, and engineers to mature the field of terraforming. It’s a multidisciplinary research field in the process of formation. 👉 Read about the development of Mars terraforming here: https://lnkd.in/ejd9TUvB We are also hiring a Lab Manager and Operations Associate to help us shape this field from the ground up! Apply here: https://lnkd.in/ev9fD6fK

Thanks so much for having me on This Week in Space! Using biotech in space opens up so many options for human space travel 🚀 🦠 - everything from indoor biomanufacturing 🏗️ to agriculture 🌽 to terraforming 🌎 This was a great conversation, enjoy :)

If we're ever to make Mars a second home, we have some serious housekeeping to do... as in a total renovation. The Red Planet has little atmosphere, no radiation shielding, and some seriously toxic soil. How can we make it more Earthlike... and should we? Dr. Erika Alden DeBenedictis joins us to discuss how terraforming might work, how it could be done in decades instead of millennia, and the questions surrounding the ethics of changing another planet to suit humanity's needs. We say it's a trailer park of a planet, but the best bet for human expansion. Dr. Rick Jenet is this week's co-host. Join us for the conversation! Lisa Laporte Tariq Malik National Space Society Fred Becker TWiT.tv Burt Dicht Erika Alden DeBenedictis #nasa #moon #lunar https://lnkd.in/g9Rs6mrE

We're hiring for an Automation Engineer! 🚀🌼🤖 🦠 Pioneer Labs is engineering microbes for Mars. We use robotics-accelerated evolution and other data-driven approaches to identify which microbes are most promising an how to improve their performance on Mars most efficiently. 🦾 We're looking for an Automation Engineer to help us take evolution and data generation to the next level. ➡️ Join us! https://lnkd.in/eR6wHUxd ⬅️ Apply by August 10th

Join me to work on laboratory automation for Mars! 🚀 We're hiring! Apply by August 10 (earlier better) In my PhD and academic lab, I worked on robotics accelerated evolution techniques like PRANCE. These same concepts are now being applied one level up - at the level of engineering whole genomes - at Pioneer. 🦠 We have methods that work and are now person-hand-limited. The perfect moment to automate! 🤖

We're hiring for an Automation Engineer! 🚀🌼🤖 🦠 Pioneer Labs is engineering microbes for Mars. We use robotics-accelerated evolution and other data-driven approaches to identify which microbes are most promising an how to improve their performance on Mars most efficiently. 🦾 We're looking for an Automation Engineer to help us take evolution and data generation to the next level. ➡️ Join us! https://lnkd.in/eR6wHUxd ⬅️ Apply by August 10th

We're hiring for an Automation Engineer! 🚀🌼🤖 🦠 Pioneer Labs is engineering microbes for Mars. We use robotics-accelerated evolution and other data-driven approaches to identify which microbes are most promising an how to improve their performance on Mars most efficiently. 🦾 We're looking for an Automation Engineer to help us take evolution and data generation to the next level. ➡️ Join us! https://lnkd.in/eR6wHUxd ⬅️ Apply by August 10th

Pioneer's engineering crank now has big bioinformatics data to back it up. We’re now able to quantitatively measure fitness effects of millions of DNA sequences simultaneously! Check it out in our new substack post. 🧑🔬 https://lnkd.in/gWwqvs3B What can we achieve with our bioinformatics approach? 🧬 Previously, our engineering crank ran evolutionary selection experiments on large extremophile genomic libraries, yielding a few high-fitness winners that could be used for strain engineering. With modern sequencing approaches, we can now measure the fitness of *every* sequence in our 10^6-member library, illuminating the effects of medium and low-fitness sequences on top of the pre-existing winners! 🤖 On top of vastly expanding our dataset size, collecting fitness data at scale will unlock big-data approaches. By using modern machine learning tools, we can test genotype -> phenotype modeling techniques to see if we predict fitness effects from DNA sequences. 📈 In order to increase conviction in our bioinformatics data, we perform a deep dive into data quality and signal. Our bioinformatics assay is highly reproducible, especially once we aggregate noisy single-library-member results across biological features such as genes. We also discover that the sequencing resolves many statistically significant fitness hits that would never be detected in our previous approach. Read about it here, comment, and follow along by subscribing.