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Pioneer Labs

@pioneerlabs.bsky.social
268 followers 263 following 18 posts

Nonprofit org on a mission to engineer microbes for Mars 🦠. Let's make biomanufacturing ubiquitous, reliable, and green — on Earth and beyond! 🚀🌼 Website: www.pioneer-labs.org Blog: pioneerlabs.substack.com

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Pioneer Labs @pioneerlabs.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
We're looking to add a junior team member to help engineer microbes for Mars. You'd run evolution and functional genomics experiments in non-model microbes. Full-time, in person in Emeryville, CA. Apply: www.pioneer-labs.org/team Our blog: blog.pioneer-labs.org Papers: pioneer-labs.org/news
jobs.gusto.com
Research Associate at Pioneer Research Laboratories
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Pioneer Labs @pioneerlabs.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
How do we simulate Mars here on Earth? We scrutinized Mars rover data so you don’t have to. 😛 Here’s what it tells us about how to simulate Mars on Earth, and which organisms could grow on Mars! 📄 Report: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Defined Mars Media (DMM), a chemically defined simulant of the soluble macro- and micro- nutrients in Mars regolith for use in biological research
Mars′ relatively moderate surface conditions, availability of solar energy, and in situ resources like water ice, carbon dioxide, and mineral-rich regolith make it a compelling target for supporting l...
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Pioneer Labs @pioneerlabs.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Terraforming Mars is a hard problem. You need to warm the entire planet by tens of degrees and make enough oxygen for humans to breathe. But you don’t need to make a magnetic field to live outside on a terraformed Mars.
pioneerlabs.substack.com
No, Mars Doesn't Need a Magnetic Field
The atmosphere isn't going anywhere
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Pioneer Labs @pioneerlabs.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
This tube is a library of bacteria with every single-base-pair genome mutation, all DNA-barcoded. 🧪Growth + barcode sequencing = data on millions of mutations. 📄 Report: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Retweet if you want more data, and read on if you want to use the library! 🧵
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Pioneer Labs @pioneerlabs.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Most lab automation software is proprietary, expensive, and painful for anybody who codes, so we ditched it. Our liquid handler runs on Python + PyLabRobot, and we're sharing our protocols open-source. pioneerlabs.substack.com/p/we-replace...
pioneerlabs.substack.com
We Replaced Our Automation Software Stack With Python 🐍
Open-source software is faster to build, easier to debug, and free to share 🔓
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Reposted by Pioneer Labs
The Align Foundation @alignbio.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
In partnership with @pioneerlabs.bsky.social, we’re proposing Tesseract: a large-scale, open microbial phenomics dataset to functionally annotate microbial genomes at scale. 🧬🤖 ✅5M diverse genes x 50 host strains × 100 conditions 🔗 Read the proposal:https://zenodo.org/records/17990299
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Pioneer Labs @pioneerlabs.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
With bioinformatics, we’re now measuring the fitnesses of millions of DNA fragments! This gets us data on whole genomes and is the first step toward big data for modeling genotype -> phenotype with AI/ML for microbial evolution. Link in comments. 🧬 + 🔢 = 📈 -> 🤖?
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Reposted by Pioneer Labs
Christina Agapakis @agapakis.com · 13/12/2024
Was so fun to talk with @asterainstitute.bsky.social resident and @pioneerlabs.bsky.social founder @erika-alden.bsky.social! Read our convo if you want to be inspired about the future of life, bioengineering, and engineered life on Mars asterainstitute.substack.com/p/lets-go-do...
asterainstitute.substack.com
"Let's go do that"
A conversation with Astera resident Erika Alden DeBenedictis
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Pioneer Labs @pioneerlabs.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Check out 🏆A Biologist’s Guide to Mars Dirt, where we present a receipt for soluble Mars Regolith Media (sMRM) that best simulates what you’d get if you added water to Mars dirt. Will anything grow in this media? Stay tuned! 💧+ 🪨 → 🌱 ? open.substack.com/pub/pioneerl...
open.substack.com
🏆 A Biologist’s Guide to Mars Dirt
Just add water
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Pioneer Labs @pioneerlabs.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Want to follow along as we engineer microbes for circular biomanufacturing in space? We're launching open science updates through our substack! ⬇️
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