- Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch featured five bio-centric startups: Opentrons’ $3 k open-source liquid-handling robot, Loop Genomics’ long-read prep with Twist Bioscience, mail-in histology service Histowiz, yeast-based chemical maker Lygos, and robotic greenhouse operator Iron Ox.  
- The 473-gene “minimal bacterial genome” (Science 351: aad6253, 2016) sparked quantitative discussion of cell volume (~4.2 × 10⁶ nm³) and the theoretical limits of further genome reduction.  
- Participants argued that whole-brain emulation faces hard economic ceilings: current neural simulations run days per microsecond, future “mindclones” will compete for scarce compute, and reversible computing cannot eliminate the irreversible memory erasure required for adaptive behavior.  
- Open protocols and low-cost hardware circulated include the autopatcher robot for automated in-vivo patch-clamp (Nature Protocols 11: 700), complete Expansion Microscopy protocols (expansionmicroscopy.org), and a hybrid microscope design published in Nature Sci. Rep. 6: 22691.  
- Cryopreservation ecosystem update: Arigos Biomedical (high-pressure vitrification), Tissue Testing Technologies (uniform organ warming), Sylvatica Biotech (cryoprotectant recipes), and X-therma (cryoprotective-protein mimics) were highlighted in The Economist as advancing organ banking.  
- Allen Institute released the first 2,000 whole-brain Drosophila image stacks (single-cell resolution) on GitHub under the BigNeuron project to accelerate automated neuron-tracing algorithms.  
- A pre-print describes real-time selective read rejection on Oxford Nanopore devices, enabling targeted sequencing without library prep and pointing toward adaptive, in-situ genomics.  
- Key neuroscience findings shared: Nature Communications paper decoding Hebbian plasticity via coordinated Ca²⁺ and mGluR signaling, and a Cell Reports nanoscale map of the axon initial segment’s protein scaffold for neuromorphic design insights.