Our Mission
Our mission is to create artificial biodiversity by applying a wild mix of experimental, chemical, biophysical and biological methods.
Our motivations are:
- to explore the limits of life, its chemical composition and biochemical principles, and to understand life and its origin as the result;
- to develop bio-based and bio-inspired technologies that are of high value to society.
Why should that be exciting at all?
Life on earth is a unity thanks to the existence of the universal genetic code shared by all living things on our planet Earth. Life-coding events and the basic chemistry of life are considered invariant due to horizontal gene transfer in all known biological taxa, making the universal genetic code the "lingua franca" of life on earth.
For at least 4 billion years, the genetic code for all living cells (with a few exceptions found mainly in various endosymbionts) is basically the same, so that all living beings use ('speak') the same "genetic language". Now, we want to change it.
In this context, we are convinced that our experiments and ideas represent the best approaches to answer a rather simple question:
Is it possible to fundamentally change the genetic code experimentally?
If not: Why?
If yes: How far we can go?
What are the societal, ethical and technological consequences of these achievements?
Got interested? Just contact us!
