Ion Genomics Podcast

About Ion Genomics Podcast

Ion Genomics brings you in-depth but also wide-ranging conversations with leading figures in genomic science and technology. Hosted by veteran science journalist Andrew P. Han, the Ion Genomics Podcast is a weekly window into the latest advances driving exploration of human biology. For more science and business news, check out www.iongenomics.bio (http://www.iongenomics.bio) and subscribe to the newsletter.

Publisher

Andrew P. Han

Category

news · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

24 Apr 2026

Latest episode

16 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

15 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   16 Oct 2026

   Epigenetics, Methylation, and Aging, With Andrew Adey

   Episode 15: OHSU Researcher Andrew Adey discusses his interest in methylation and how researchers are using new technologies to fill in theories about cell identity and aging dating back to  the 1950s. For more stories, podcasts, and other coverage of genomics, visit www.iongenomics.bio. Show Notes Eric Topol Substack Article: “Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging” (https://erictopol.substack.com/p/loss-of-cell-identity-drives-human) Review paper on epigenetics and aging: Yücel, A.D., Molière, A. & Gladyshev, V.N. “Written in development and lost in ageing: the grammar of cellular identity.” (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10955-0) Nature. Sept. 30, 2026. Another paper on epigenetics and aging Lu et al. “Prevalent mesenchymal drift in aging and disease is reversed by partial reprogramming.” (https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00853-0) Cell. October 2025. Adey lab preprint on single-cell methylation analysis in the brain: Rylaarsdam, et al. “Early postnatal DNA methylation dynamics define neuronal subtypes and are disrupted by MECP2 loss.” (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.06.730504v1) bioRxiv. June 8, 2026. Adey lab Amethyst paper: Rylaarsdam, et al. “Single-cell DNA methylation analysis tool Amethyst resolves distinct non-CG methylation patterns in human astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.” Commun Biol. Oct. 14, 2025. Ecker lab paper on non-canonical methylation in the brain: Lister, et al. “Global epigenomic reconfiguration during mammalian brain development.” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1237905) Science. July 4, 2013. My GenomeWeb story (https://www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/dna-methylation-analysis-poised-make-strides-after-big-year-tech-advances/) on methylation sequencing tech (paywall) SciMet v3 paper: Nichols, et al. “Atlas-scale single-cell DNA methylation profiling with sciMETv3.”Cell Genomics. Jan. 8, 2025.

2. 

   9 Oct 2026

   What is Grail’s Galleri If It Can’t Be Called ‘Early?’ With Alex Dickinson

   Grail’s Galleri blood-based cancer detection test appears headed towards approval by the FDA after it passed a trio of votes from an advisory committee Sept. 23. However, a closer look at the votes — especially the split vote (https://www.iongenomics.bio/p/fda-panel-split-6-4-on-grail-galleri?r=3ihla5) on the question of efficacy — and the debate that preceded it revealed just how much remains unsettled about what the test achieves. As this is the first test of its kind, with more to follow, how FDA chooses to regulate multiple aspects will reveal a lot about where the field is and what it still may need to prove. And it may be the last chance science-minded regulators have to put some reins on Galleri before it gets out into a world where Grail has used its money and influence to tilt the market in its favor. Alex Dickinson, a former Illumina executive who has built a large following on LinkedIn, in part due to his sharp critiques of Grail and Galleri, joined me to break the situation down. Show Notes Alex Dickinson’ LinkedIn Feed (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgdickinson/recent-activity/all/) OpenOnco (https://www.openonco.org/) Gilbert Welch STAT Op-ed https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/06/grail-multi-cancer-screening-test-criticism/ (https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/06/grail-multi-cancer-screening-test-criticism/) AdCom Vote Explanation Segment Transcript, including Dan Swerdlow's quote on the burden of Galleri on the US healthcare system https://www.iongenomics.bio/p/raw-reads-grail-galleri-fda-adcom?r=3ihla5 (https://www.iongenomics.bio/p/raw-reads-grail-galleri-fda-adcom?r=3ihla5) My story for GenomeWeb on Grail disclosing that the NHS-Galleri trial not meet its primary endpoint (Paywall) https://www.genomeweb.com/cancer/grail-fda-plans-undeterred-after-nhs-galleri-mced-trial-misses-primary-endpoint/ (https://www.genomeweb.com/cancer/grail-fda-plans-undeterred-after-nhs-galleri-mced-trial-misses-primary-endpoint/) David Cameron NHS/Grail/Illumina https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58146567 (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58146567) https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q1706 (https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q1706) Grail’s $15 million in lobbying https://www.iongenomics.bio/p/grails-15m-lobbying-shortcut-newsletter?r=3ihla5 (https://www.iongenomics.bio/p/grails-15m-lobbying-shortcut-newsletter?r=3ihla5) Grail participation in RFK Jr.-linked event, first reported by Bloomberg (paywall) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-18/rfk-jr-linked-group-offered-access-to-us-officials-for-payment (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-18/rfk-jr-linked-group-offered-access-to-us-officials-for-payment) And also in the Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-22/rfk-jr-linked-group-offered-access-to-us-officials-for-fee (https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-22/rfk-jr-linked-group-offered-access-to-us-officials-for-fee) NHS Oncologists’ Letter to The Lancet “GRAIL-Galleri: why the special treatment?”   (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)02830-1/fulltext)

3. 

   25 Sept 2026

   Illumina’s China FOMO, with BridgeCross Bio’s Matt Marlowe

   Episode 13 China’s burgeoning biotech and genomics markets make for the ultimate compare and contrast. Like the US, it has regional hotspots, intense competition, and a big company whose success has helped seed a second wave of startups, many of whom are now breaking through. However, the clinical system is both vast and vastly different, marketing approaches can seem stuck in the past, and success abroad — rather than at home — may end up being the difference between making it and getting caught in the churn. That’s according to Matthew Marlowe, who runs BridgCross Bio, a digital publication seeking to provide insight into China’s biotech industry for a Western audience. Earlier this month, Marlowe spent two weeks traveling across China to meet with and discover companies based there. We discuss some of the new tech he’ll be watching and what it means for companies based in the US and Europe, especially Illumina, which has been hamstrung by high-level government policy that has made it difficult to grow revenue there. Make sure to listen all the way through for a new tidbit I’ve extracted about Illumina CEO Jacob Thaysen’s May trip to China at the invitation of the White House. Marlowe is also founder of Genapse, a marketing company for life science companies.

4. 

   18 Sept 2026

   How Well Do AI Models Understand Wet Lab Work? With Benchling’s Nicholas Larus-Stone

   Nicholas Larus-Stone (https://nlarusstone.com/) is Benchling’s Head of AI and coauthor of a new benchmarking study putting large language models (LLMs) like Claude and ChatGPT to work redesigning wet lab protocols. The models did just fine, but didn’t blow the Benchling team away. “They can certainly be helpful at certain biological tasks, but they've by no means solved some of the kind of biology problems that people really care about,” Larus-Stone said. That said, he believes that pharmaceutical companies should be spending more on AI usage. That’s just one of several spicier takes we got into in our conversation. Listen for more of Larus-Stone’s thoughts on why benchmarking LLMs is important, how open-source models can be competitive against proprietary ones, how he has fostered cross-pollination between software engineers and scientists by founding Bits in Bio, and whether he likes the term “TechBio.” Show Notes Benchling’s Bench-Bench protocol study white paper (https://assets.ctfassets.net/kzeezny59h5p/1spGaR3QP9B9CBfuXHMrLl/0ba5a1de599daf1e57faabc62564eb88/BenchBench-Protocol.pdf) Benchling blog post (https://www.benchling.com/blog/can-llms-work-in-the-wet-lab) about the benchmarking study Bits in Bio Website (https://www.bitsinbio.org/) Bits in Bio 2025 Annual Report (https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/673b37268149bcb7fc36f4bd/6a08c1e10c27c681cf1bea30_2025_Annual_Report%20-%20Bits%20in%20Bio.pdf) Other AI benchmarking studies From Jure Lescovec’s lab and the Biomni team (https://www.iongenomics.bio/p/more-on-biomni-and-claude-science?r=3ihla5): Qu et al. “BiomniBench: Process-level Evaluation of LLM Agents for Real-world Biomedical Research” (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.12.724604v2)bioRxiv. May 12, 2026. Guo et al. “PromptBio-Bench: Benchmarking LLM-based Bioinformatics Agents for End-to-End Data Analysis.” (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.05.723092v2.full)BioRxiv. June 1, 2026. Other podcast episodes referenced https://www.iongenomics.bio/p/ai-agents-are-coming-for-the-lab (https://www.iongenomics.bio/p/ai-agents-are-coming-for-the-lab)

5. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Mitochondria Are NOT Just the Powerhouse of the Cell, with Gordon Freedman

   Gordon Freedman and I both developed an interest in mitochondria due to our love of cycling and to understand the limits of performance. Whereas I sought to find a racer’s edge by delving into the biology underlying endurance sports, Freedman sought answers to a simpler question: Why can’t I push as hard as I used to be able to? Follow us down the rabbit hole to a world where there are multiple genomes to consider — one of them bacterial in nature — and a dearth of experimental tools has made it hard to connect mitochondria and their functions to other questions in biology and health. But there’s also hope that by connecting mitochondria to research areas such as cancer and neurodegenerative disease, scientists can peer further into the darkness than they could with only the light of the nuclear genome. Show notes: Gordon’s website, MitoWorld (http://www.mitoworld.org) Distribution of pools of mitochondria in skeletal muscle cells. Image credit (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2024/01/08/2024.01.08.574684/F1.large.jpg): Parry et al. Parry et al. “Impact of Capillary and Sarcolemmal Proximity on Mitochondrial Structure and Energetic Function in Skeletal Muscle.” (https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/JP286246) The Journal of Physiology. April 2, 2024. Guo, Y., Xue, Y. Mitochondria as convergence hubs for innate immunity pathways. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-026-10479-3) Communications Biology. (June 8, 2026). Shen et al. “Mitochondria as Cellular and Organismal Signaling Hubs.” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35804477/)The Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. July 8, 2022. IMDB page for A Brief History of Time. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103882/ (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103882/)

6. 

   14 Aug 2026

   How Technology and Trust Help Fight Epidemics, with Journalist Will Herkewitz

   How are people fighting ongoing epidemics using genomics-based technologies such as PCR diagnostics and mRNA vaccines in a world where funding from the US and other rich countries is on the decline? My guest this week, my dear friend and fellow journalist William Herkewitz, has reported on the recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as tuberculosis around the world. A former communications director for the now defunct USAID in multiple African countries, he has seen firsthand how funding from the US helped keep people healthy and infectious diseases at bay. We discuss what happens when dollars disappear, and with them, networks of people and trust. We also evaluate PCR, next-generation sequencing, and paper-based diagnostic tests in these remote and resource-limited settings. For more of Will’s reporting, check out The Rift Valley Dispatch, also on Substack. https://www.theriftvalleydispatch.com/ (https://www.theriftvalleydispatch.com/) Show notes: Will's New York Times Op-ed “Why We Couldn't Sell America on U.S.A.I.D.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/opinion/usaid-ending.html) “Rollout of 5,000 Near Point-of-Care TB Test Systems in 13 Countries Begins With $50M in Funding,”  (https://www.genomeweb.com/molecular-diagnostics/rollout-5000-near-point-care-tb-test-systems-13-countries-begins-50m-funding) by Madeleine Johnson

7. 

   24 Jul 2026

   How to Wiretap a Billion Cells, with Dino Di Carlo

   What happens when scientists come together and realize they didn’t have the data to back up their assumptions? Dino Di Carlo, my guest on this week’s Ion Genomics podcast, shares how he reacted when he found out that there were huge gaps in understanding how individual cells communicate with each other. To remedy this, he has proposed a project to analyze a billion cells, largely in two-cell dyads. He published a paper outlining his vision in Nature Biotechnology. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-026-03177-2) His idea leverages two sequencing technologies. One is proximity sequencing (Prox-seq) (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-022-01684-z), a method developed at the University of Chicago that offers information on proteins near each other on top of standard single-cell transcriptomics. Another, developed in Di Carlo’s lab and being commercialized by a company he cofounded, is nanovials (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.1c11420), a cell capture method that enables the analysis of cell dyads using popular single-cell sequencing techniques. The tech is being commericalized by Partillion Bioscience, a company Di Carlo cofounded. Di Carlo spoke to me from Japan, where he’s spending the summer setting up a satellite lab, in large part to find stability after he was denied access to grant funding his lab had been awarded as part of the Trump Administration’s conflict with major research universities. Stay tuned to the end for his recommendations on the most underrated sushi types on the menu.

8. 

   10 Jul 2026

   AI Agents are Coming for the Lab, With Tahoe Bio CSO Johnny Yu

   My guest this week, Johnny Yu, has seen firsthand how the new code-writing capabilities of LLMs has widened horizons for the use of AI in biology. Tahoe Bio, a company he cofounded, has built its own AI agents, which are helping it rethink how to use AI in drug discovery and development. We discuss two other recent agentic AI developments from recent weeks. A publication in Science (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4351) from Jure Leskovec's Stanford University Lab on Biomni, a multi-purpose, general intelligence that he hopes will help researchers get more out of their efforts. “What if every biomedical scientist had a tireless expert collaborator?," he said. "One that could actually go read literature, one that could actually go run the analysis, understand the data, design the experiments across any area of biology?” Started in 2024 and put up as an open-source project in 2025, Biomni — already being commercialized by a startup, Phylo — heralds a new wave of technologies that stand on the shoulders of the large language models behind products like Google Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. Just last week, Anthropic launched Claude Science, another wide-ranging research aide that is also based on AI agents. And a recent leap in Claude’s ability to write code means even more are likely on the way. Researchers are already lining up to try them out. According to Leskovec and his Phylo cofounders Kexin Huang and Jerry Qu, more than 10,000 people have already started using Biomni. For more, check out the post on iongenomics.bio.

9. 

   26 Jun 2026

   Maximal Cancer Diagnostics with Sid Sijbrandij and Jacob Stern

   In 2024, Sid Sijbrandij got the news that no cancer patient wants to hear: his tumor was back and his doctors told him they had nothing left to offer. Sid, a tech entrepreneur who up until that point had been running his company, GitLab, went all in, doing as much testing and as many treatments as he could. It seems to have worked. Moreover, Sid’s team thinks they’ve been able to figure out what went right, thanks to heaps of molecular data they’ve collected, including single-cell sequencing data. “It's very difficult, if not impossible, to do causative work in an N-of-1 study, but because we have this longitudinal sampling over the course of Sid's case, we can start to build a mechanistic hypothesis,” said Jacob Stern, a single-cell data expert on Sid's team and veteran of 10x Genomics. “Which seems to be that there was a bunch of combination immunotherapy that helped to rev up the immune system over the course of 2024.” Join Sid, Jacob, and I as we discuss the "maximal diagnostics” approach and how Sid plans to bring it to other patients who find themselves in a similar situation.During our chat, Sid mentions that he got a treatment from a company started by a friend he made at the Y Combinator startup accelerator. That company is Shasqi (https://www.shasqi.com/leadership), founded by José Oneto. To see a timeline of Sid’s experience and all the data he and his team collected diagnosing and treating his disease check out osteosarc.com (http://osteosarc.com). Sid has also written about his experience on his personal Substack. (https://sijbrandij.substack.com/p/im-going-founder-mode-on-my-cancer) For more information about Sid’s policy proposals, check out slide 17 of his embedded PowerPoint at https://sytse.com/cancer/ (https://sytse.com/cancer/) For more information about the cancer “playbooks” offered by the Sijbrandij Foundation’s Future of Cancer Care Today program, see: https://sijbrandijfoundation.org/fcct (https://sijbrandijfoundation.org/fcct) More information about the companies Sid is investing in to bring aspects of his maximal diagnostics approach to market is at Evenone.ventures (http://Evenone.ventures).

10. 

    19 Jun 2026

    Protein Sequencing-by-Subtraction with Pumpkinseed Cofounder/CEO Jen Dionne

    “We right now are developing our technology to be able very soon to sequence roughly hundred-length proteins that are on each of those sensors within a 24-hour period. You can think about this as being essentially 10 billion letters per day: 100 million sensors times those 100-mers on each sensor and then sequencing letter by letter.” That’s the scale that Pumpkinseed CEO and Cofounder Jen Dionne thinks her company can reach for analyzing proteins. The technology, developed in her lab at Stanford University, uses Raman spectroscopy to fingerprint molecules and Edman degradation to achieve sequencing-by-subtraction of peptides: 30 amino acids at a time now, possibly up to 300, or full-length proteins, in the future. The ability to capture 10 billion amino acids per day would represent several orders of magnitude better throughput than the best and fastest proteomics methods available today, whether via mass spectroscopy or other single-molecule technologies being developed by competitors like Quantum-Si or Nautilus. Remarkably, that’s still a long way from achieving the data acquisition rate that state-of-the-art high-throughput sequencers can achieve, but it’s enough to start thinking about making the type of impact that the first next-generation sequencers had on biological research. Join us as we discuss the underlying physics behind Pumpkinseed’s technology, Jen’s journey from lab to C-suite, the applications they’re already pursuing, and her love of sports, including the World Cup. For more information, check out pumpkinseed.bio (http://pumpkinseed.bio) or email Jen. Links to papers discussed in the episode: Hu et al. Rapid genetic screening with high quality factor metasurfaces (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39721-w). Nature Communications, July 26, 2023. Zhang et al. From Genotype to Phenotype: Raman Spectroscopy and Machine Learning for Label-Free Single-Cell Analysis (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.4c04282). ACS Nano, July 1, 2024. Stiber, et al. Dynamic, single-cell monitoring of CAR T cell identity and activation with Raman spectroscopy (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.22.707331v1). BioRxiv, February 23, 2026.

11. 

    12 Jun 2026

    Q1 Company News Roundup with Wall Street Analyst Kyle Mikson

    What kind of market share can Illumina expect when it launches its own MRD kits and is it worth the risk of annoying customers that also offer those tests? Why did liquid biopsy company stocks do so well in May? What were his headline takeaways from the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting? Where is he going on summer vacation after a hectic several months? Tune in to hear the answers to these questions, and more. If you’re interested in learning more about Kyle’s takes on the life science tools and diagnostics industries, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn to start a conversation. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylemiksoncfa/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylemiksoncfa/) For full disclosure, he asked me to note that Seer is an investment banking client of Canaccord Genuity.

12. 

    5 Jun 2026

    Spatial Perturb-seq, so hot right now! With Alexander Nevue

    “It's one extra step ahead of a single cell RNA-seq workflow where we can get all the information that we can get from standard Perturb-seq, but we also know the spatial location.” That’s how my guest this week, Arc Institute Senior Scientist Alexander Nevue, describes PerturbSpace, a new method he and his colleagues introduced in a preprint posted to BioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.25.727765v1) May 18. PerturbSpace is the latest method to marry the power of CRISPR-based perturbation screening, where genes across the genome are systematically targeted and the effects of those perturbations are read out in the transcriptome of the cell in which they were made. This juncture of CRISPR-based screening and spatial transcriptomics is one of the hottest areas in molecular biology right now, with nearly 10 different methods published in the last two years, from leading scientists including Genentech’s Aviv Regev; Harvard University’s Xiaowei Zhuang, the inventor of MERFISH and cofounder of Vizen; Yale University’s Rong Fan, and the Broad Institute’s Sami Farhi. Join Alex and me as we discuss the PertubSpace workflow, its advantages and disadvantages compared to other spatial perturb-seq methods, and where he sees the data from these screens making the most impact. Links to other publications of spatial perturbation screening methods with notable authors: PerturbView. Aviv Regev and Erik Lubeck of Genentech. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02391-0 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02391-0) Large-scale pooled in vivo CRISPR screening. Jonathan Weissman of MIT and Harvard’s Xiaowei Zhuang, inventor of MERFISH and cofounder of Vizgen. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.18.624217v3 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.18.624217v3) SPAtial Cell Exploration (SPACE). Joe Beechem of Bruker/NanoString, in collaboration with Merck. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.14.675819v2 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.14.675819v2) Perturb-DBiT. Rong Fan of Yale University, inventor of DBIT family of methods and cofounder of AtlasXOmics . https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6481967/v1 (https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6481967/v1) CRISPRMap. Jellert Gaublomme of Columbia University, Dan Landau of Weill Cornell Medicine. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02386-x (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02386-x) Perturb-FISH. Sami Farhi  of the Broad Institute. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00197-7 (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00197-7) NIS-Seq Jonathan L. Schmid-Burgk of University Hospital Bonn. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02516-5 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02516-5) Spatial Perturb-Sseq. Wei Leong Chew of A*STAR GIS. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69677-6 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69677-6)

13. 

    8 May 2026

    Remembering Craig Venter With Jamie Shreeve, Author of 'The Genome War'

    Craig Venter, the renegade scientist who tried to beat the publicly-funded Human Genome Project with a private company — and nearly succeeded — died last week at 79. My guest this week, Jamie Shreeve, shadowed Venter for two years as part of his research for The Genome War, a book about the saga that captured not only the best and the worst aspects of Venter, but of human nature itself. Shreeve and I evaluated Venter’s legacy while also reminiscing about the man who will be remembered both as a good friend and as an “asshole” in equal measure. We also remembered Venter’s longtime colleague and Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, who died in October. Shreeve is also revealing, for the first time, a James Watson take on Venter so brutal that Shreeve left it out of the book. I never met Venter, so my conception of him has always been and will forever be based on Shreeve’s portrait of him. The Genome War is one of my all-time favorite books and provides an even fuller picture. Please consider buying a copy through your local bookstore: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-genome-war-how-craig-venter-tried-to-capture-the-code-of-life-and-save-the-world-james-shreeve/e018f9700a01fcd0?ean=9780345433749&next=t (https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-genome-war-how-craig-venter-tried-to-capture-the-code-of-life-and-save-the-world-james-shreeve/e018f9700a01fcd0?ean=9780345433749&next=t) Shreeve is also the author of The Neandertal Enigma (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19447625-the-neandertal-enigma) and co-author of Lucy’s Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor. A note: In the interview I say that sequencing-by-synthesis, the dominant method for analyzing whole human genomes today, is similar to the shotgun sequencing method used by Venter at Celera. As I was informed by Adam Phillippy, a leading computational biologist, this is not correct. “Performing de novo genome assembly, as was required for the first genome project, is nearly impossible from short (~100 bp) reads,” he said in an email. “During the entire short-read era, people were mapping reads to the human reference, rather than re-assembling the genome each time.” Still, Venter's work helped push the field towards assembling a reference genome, which was essential for SBS. “This method of analysis was only possible because a reference sequence already existed,” Phillippy said. “Early SBS would have been nearly worthless without a reference sequence.”

14. 

    1 May 2026

    AI Virtual Cell Pioneer Christina Theodoris

    Do AI models in biology have to get bigger to get better? And what can you do with more training, more computing power, and more outputs? Joining me this week to talk about MaxToki (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.30.715396v1), a new AI-powered model that can predict how cells age, is Christina Theodoris, a physician scientist at the Gladstone Institutes who is using her models to study cardiovascular disease. She's a pioneer in this field, having developed GeneFormer, a model trained on millions of single-cell transcriptomes that can predict what will happen when gene networks are disturbed. But size isn’t everything. “The biggest impact we see though is with diversity of the data,” she said. “As we increase the diversity, that actually has even more impact than just the pure numbers, let's say if you were to use cells that are similar to the ones seen before.” This has implications for training new, even more powerful models. Theodoris is also an accomplished visual artist whose paintings draw on surrealism, cultural heritage, and memory. In addition to her models, we talked about the trend of AI slop, how she would paint her models, and whether or not she likes the Ion Genomics logos I came up with. To learn more about her art, please check out Christinatheodoris.com (http://Christinatheodoris.com) Links to Theodoris’ work discussed in this episode: MaxToki Preprint https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.30.715396v1 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.30.715396v1) Scaling GeneFormer “Scaling and quantization of large-scale foundation model enables resource-efficient predictions in network biology,” Nature Computational Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-026-00972-4 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-026-00972-4) "Discovery of candidate therapeutic targets with Geneformer," Nature Protocols https://www.nature.com/articles/s41596-026-01364-8 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41596-026-01364-8)

15. 

    24 Apr 2026

    First podcast! With 10x Genomics CEO Serge Saxonov

    Earlier this week I spoke with 10x Genomics CEO and Cofounder Serge Saxonov at the AACR meeting, where 10x launched Atera, its new instrument for spatial biology. In addition to hitting product pricing and specs, we spoke about the challenges of starting a new company, our favorite model organisms, and why he thinks Atera will be 10x’s most consequential product launch yet.

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