GUEST: Mikhail Shapiro, Pasadena In this episode we welcome our famous guest Mikhail Shapiro from Caltech. Mikhail exquisitely combines ultrasound with synthetic biology for gene regulation, imaging, and therapy - and Synthetic biology is surely the common thread in this podcast edition. We discover how an engineered receptor and an intracellular signalling domain, known as ‘synNotch’ can be used to visualise cell-cell communication in vivo. And how this system can be used to identify immune-cancer cell interactions, why it provides far more information than just knowing where the immune cells reside, and the various merits of the three different reporter genes employed for visualisation across scales. We also reveal some insider information into the review process for the selected paper from the senior author John Ronald. Along the way, we speculate why the synNotch system improves NK cell kill and Tim ends up dreaming of sheep jumping over logic gates! Selected Publication: Visualizing cell–cell communication using synthetic notch activated MRI. TianDuo Wang, Yuanxin Chen, Nivin N Nystrom, Shirley Liu, Yanghao Fu, Francisco M Martinez, Timothy J Scholl, and John A Ronald. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Mar 14; 120(11):e2216901120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2216901120. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2216901120 Further information on the European Society for Molecular Imaging: https://e-smi.eu/ Contact: [email protected]