…flexible working hours prestigious and cooperative atmosphere in the coworking environment (Mindspace on Koszykowa 61 Street) possibility to develop open source projects private healthcare, sport card plenty of celebrations and…
…flexible working hours prestigious and cooperative atmosphere in the coworking environment (Mindspace on Koszykowa 61 Street) possibility to develop open source projects private healthcare, sport card plenty of celebrations and…
Enzymes are extremely powerful natural catalysts able to perform almost any type of chemical reaction while being mild by nature and highly specific. In fact, the delicate functioning of enzymes forms the basis of every living creature. The catalytic potential of enzymes is more and more appreciated by the industry as many industrial processes rely on these sophisticated catalysts. However, the number of reactions catalyzed by enzymes is restricted as enzymes only have evolved to catalyze reactions that are physiologically relevant. Furthermore, enzymes have adapted to the direct (cellular) environment in which they have to function (e.g. operative at ambient temperature, resilient towards proteolysis, catalytic turnover rate should fit with metabolic enzyme partners). This excludes the existence of enzymes that do not fit within boundaries set by nature. It is a great challenge to go beyond these natural boundaries and develop methodologies to design ‘unnatural’ tailor-made enzymes. Ideally it should become possible to (re)design enzymes to convert pre-defined substrates. Such designer enzymes could theoretically exhibit unsurpassed catalytic properties and, obviously, will be of significant interest for industrial biotechnology. The OXYGREEN project aims at the design and construction of novel oxygenating enzymes (designer oxygenases) for the production of compounds that can be used in medicine, food and agriculture and the development of novel powerful and generic enzyme redesign tools for this purpose. The enzymes and whole-cell biocatalysts that will be developed should catalyze the specific incorporation of oxygen to afford synthesis of bioactive compounds in a selective and clean way, with minimal side products and with no use of toxic materials. For this, generic platform technologies (novel high-throughput methodology and methods for engineering dedicated host cells) will be developed that allow effective structure-inspired directed evolution of enzyme.
This project concerns the design of cryptographic schemes that are secure even if implemented on not-secure devices. The motivation for this work comes from an observation that most of the real-life attacks on cryptographic devices do not break their mathematical foundations, but exploit vulnerabilities of their implementations. This concerns both the cryptographic software executed on PCs (that can be attacked by viruses), and the implementations on hardware (that can be subject to the side-channel attacks). Typically, fixing this problem was left to the practitioners, since it was a common belief that theory cannot be of any help here. However, new exciting results in cryptography suggest that this view was too pessimistic: there exist methods to design cryptographic protocols in such a way that they are secure even if the hardware on which they are executed cannot be fully trusted. The goal of this project is to investigate these methods further, unify them in a solid mathematical theory (many of them were developed independently), and propose new ideas in this area. The project will be mostly theoretical (although some practical experiments may be performed). Our main interest lies within the theory of private circuits, bounded-retrieval model, physically-observable cryptography, and human-assisted cryptography. We view these theories just as the point of departure, since the field is largely unexplored and we expect to witness completely new ideas soon.
The objective of this project is to use Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in Bioinformatics. The primary application will be the Smith Waterman algorithm. Later we will assess the benefits of applying FPGA for other bioinformatics tasks. As part of the project a large cluster of over 500 simple (Spartan6) FPGAs will be build.
Chirality is a key factor in the efficacy of many drugs and the production of single enantiomers of chiral intermediates has therefore become increasingly important. Biocatalysis offers high enantioselectivity and regioselectivity in chiral synthesis through enzyme-catalyzed reactions and thus has an important advantage over chemical synthesis. Molecular genomic data is an unprecedented resource of enzymes for biocatalysis, but rational and effective methodologies must be established to realize the full potential of these resources. This project will focus on the discovery of novel enzymes, from both public and proprietary eubacterial genomes, in particular novel alcohol dehydrogenases, cytochrome P450 monooxygenases and amino acid modifying enzymes for use in established and innovative processes for chiral synthesis.
The DataGenome project extends from genome analysis, through cloning, expression, enzyme production, screening and protein engineering, to the enzymatic production of chiral biomolecules. The design of the project takes advantage of broad funnel-approach starting with innovative data-mining and processing of a large number of genes to ensure high flow-through in the process and rational selection of best enzyme candidates. The specific combination of expertise and design of the research project is aimed at high success-rate for the development of successful biocatalysts. Emphasis will be put on effective bioinformatics analysis to minimize the requirement for the more laborious “wet chemistry” analysis as well as development of optimized vector-host systems for efficient gene expression and enzyme production. Rational protein engineering or directed molecular evolution will be employed in order to obtain more robust variants, new substrate preferences or enhanced enantiomeric selectivity. Selected enzymes will be tested in existing and/or novel biocatalytic processes for production of chiral pharmaceutical intermediates with applications in therapeutic areas including AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
Within this project we will test the applicability of crypto currencies as a facilitator of political movements. The currency will be used to motivate people to (1) select members of parliament based on fitness of personal opinions on major political issues and (2) monitor the correlation between verbally expressed statements and actually passed acts. The currency will be also tested as an alternative means to finance political activities and assess the trust towards political organizations. The currency will be designed to offer advantages over other currently most popular currencies and remain competitive also after the experiment.