Research Projects

Life is the most amazing phenomenon in the world around us. Yet, we don’t understand how it works or where it comes from. ‘Understanding life’ is the grand challenge that drives all our research. At first sight, life appears to be an intractable clew of chemical reactions. Yet, there is order in this chaos. Understanding how exactly this order emerges is crucial to understanding how life works.

We know that vast networks of chemical reactions together create a living system, but we don’t know how these networks originated, we don’t have a deep understanding of what chemical reactions networks are capable of, we cannot build such networks in vitro, and we don’t know much about their dynamics in vivo.

We have assembled a highly diverse and multidisciplinary team to progress our understanding of life, and organized our research into four subthemes: