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© 2026 EPFL

Happy Birthday LSAM!

— Time flies… on June 1 the LSAM celebrated its first birthday! What an exciting year is behind us with many great achievements, most notably the successful establishment of the lab in Lausanne. It feels like home already!

© 2026 EPFL

The LSAM family keeps growing: welcome Iza and Basti!

— The LSAM is delighted to welcome two new members, Iza and Basti! Iza Pomykalska (right) has started her PhD in May and will be working on expanding our DNA recorder technologies to new hosts and application areas. Basti Barthel (left) is going to build a data-driven engineering pipeline to chart new grounds in the production of key metabolic precursors for bioproduction. We are very happy to have you!

Markus Jeschek. Credit: Alain Herzog (EPFL)

“We might 'turn a knob' but we can't predict what will happen”

— Markus Jeschek is a tenure-track assistant professor at EPFL's Lonza Chair in Sustainable Biosynthesis. His research targets the building of synthetic microbes with new capabilities.

© 2025 EPFL

Welcome to the LSAM, Max and Nik!

— The Laboratory of Synthetic and Applied Microbiology (LSAM) has two new members: Nikolas Seidel (left) who started his PhD August 2025 and Dr. Maximilian O. Bahls (right) who is a senior Postdoc in the LSAM since July. Welcome Nik and Max! We are looking forward to exciting endeavors in data-driven protein and metabolic engineering with you!

© Elsa M.

Boosting enzyme engineering with DNA recorders and epistasis-aware AI

— Machine learning (ML) has revolutionized prediction and design of protein structure, but creating new protein function remains very challenging. Researchers from the LSAM, ETH Zurich and the MPI Munich have now developed a pipeline to boost the engineering of enzymes with new activities synergistically combining ultrahigh-throughput experiments with ML that leverages epistatic trends.

© 2025 EPFL

LSAM is born!

— The Laboratory of Synthetic and Applied Microbiology (LSAM) has officially been established at EPFL in June 2025!

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