Erika Alden DeBenedictis
I’m a scientist solving big problems using evolution as the CEO of Pioneer Labs.
Places I’ve been: Caltech (undergrad), NASA JPL (research), MIT (PhD), David Baker’s Lab (postdoc), The Francis Crick Institute (my academic lab).
Top of the mind: An interview where I talk about the origins of life.
Pioneer Labs
Erika founded Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit startup engineering life to make Mars more habitable. We work with hardy critters that can grow robustly even in extreme conditions. Pioneer aims to make biomanufacturing ubiquitous, reliable, and green — on Earth and beyond.
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The case for Mars terraforming research
A Nature Astronomy perspective on why terraforming must be urgently studied.
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Grow Everything Podcast
This podcast featured me in a discussion of evolution, automation, and space science.
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New Space Documentry
Pioneer was featured in Story Co’s first documentary, New space.
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"Let's go do that"
An interview on the origins of life, the feeling of doing science, and the possibility of terraforming Mars.
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Why nothing can grow on Mars*
*probably. An essay on the challenge and organism would face outside on the red planet.
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Polyextremophile engineering review
A review summarizing the basic mechanisms of extreme adaptations and synthetic biology’s efforts to engineer extremophile organisms beyond what is fund in nature.
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2024 Mars Terraforming Workshop
Proceedings of a two-day workshop on terraforming Mars.
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Academic lab
Erika ran an academic at the Francis Crick Institute in London, focused on robotics accelerated evolution of proteins and microbes.
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Halogenase evolution
Evolution of halogenase enzymes using PACE.
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SubtiToolKit
A toolkit for multi-part Golden Gate assembly in B subtilis.
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JoVE article on PRANCE
A Journal of Visual Experiments article on how to set up Phage and Robotics Assisted Near Continuous Evolution.
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molpigs podcast
A podcast where I talk about starting a lab.
The Align Foundation
Erika founded The Align Foundation, a nonprofit improving the reproducibility, scalability, and shareability of life science research with programmable experiments. Align hosts programs at the intersection of biology and automation, including the 2022 Bioautomation Challenge, and the Open Datasets Initiative. Erika now serves on Align’s Scientific Advisory Board.
MACHINE LEARNING FOR PROTEIN ENGINEERING
Erika did a postdoc in David Baker’s Lab, where she worked on machine learning for protein design.
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Randomized gates eliminate bias in sort-seq assays, protein science
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Systematic Molecular Evolution using Prance, ML Protein Engineering Seminar Series
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DMS in Protein Design, Deep Mutational Scanning Symposium 2021
genetic code expansion
Erika received a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT, where she studied the origins of life and the possibility of engineering a new, expanded genetic alphabet as part of Kevin Esvelt’s Lab. In particular, she studied whether it we could engineer bacteria that use a genetic code based on larger four-base codons (rather than the usual three-base codons), which would vastly expand the genetic alphabet.
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Media Coverage: Could Life use a Longer Genetic Code?
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Media Coverage: Genetic Code: Expanding Codon Size
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Measuring the Tolerance of the Genetic Code to Altered Codon Size. Debenedictis et al. Elife
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Multiplex Suppression of Four Quadruplet Codons via TRNA Directed Evolution. Debenedictis et al. Nature communications
ROBOTICS-ACCELERATED EVOLUTION
During Erika’s PhD at MIT Biological Engineering, she used laboratory automation to create PRANCE, a platform for protein engineering that is faster and more robust.
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Systematic Molecular Evolution Enables Robust Biomolecule Discovery. debenedictis et al. Nature Methods
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Media Coverage: MIT News
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Enabling High-ThroughPut Biology With Flexible Open-Source Automation. Chory el al. Molecular Systems Biology
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Systematic Molecular Evolution Using PRANCE, IC-CSYNB Seminar
Full-efficient Orbit Planning
Erika received a BS in Computer Science from Caltech. While at Caltech, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on mission design and orbit planning.
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Strategies for Fuel-Efficient Space Travel, TEDXINTEL
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The First Three Rungs of the Cosmological Distance Ladder
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Autonomous Navigation System for Spacecraft using Low-thrust Trajectories
