Florian Hollfelder and Timo Kohler have received opportunity seed funding for their research on “Genetic control by transcription factor engineering: a broadly applicable tool for ecosystem science and species conservation”. This project is funded by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) within their Engineering Ecosystem Resilience opportunity space, which is exploring if combining high-resolution measurement with targeted, resilience-boosting interventions could reverse biodiversity decline and prevent ecological collapse.
The initiative seeks to pair advanced monitoring with resilience-boosting intervention to halt biodiversity loss and enable people and nature to thrive. The opportunity seeds support the ambitious research of 14 projects, from advanced ecosystem sensing and nature-based interventions to autonomous robotics and molecular tools for conservation, across individual research teams, universities and start ups to maximise the chance of breakthroughs.
The Hollfelder Group project seeks to make induced pluripotent stem cells technology into a broadly applicable tool for ecosystem science and species conservation: “While genetic biobanks have become an essential component of conservation strategy, they remain fundamentally archival: frozen samples preserve genetic diversity, but they do not allow us to use it to understand resilience, vulnerability, or adaptive potential. By ‘immortalising’ the full genome of an individual in a self-renewing cellular state, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have the potential to transform genetic diversity from a static, archival resource into a living, experimentally tractable tool.
To make iPSC technology a broadly applicable tool for ecosystem science, this project aims to create a portable programming capability by engineering next-generation transcription factors through directed evolution and deep mutational scanning. Such transcription factors would enable experimental interrogation of genetic diversity before it is lost, support functional testing of resilience strategies in contained settings, and create a bridge between genomics, cellular biology, and ecosystem-level decision-making.”
Read more about the Engineering Ecosystem Resilience projects on the ARIA website.