Prof. Dr. Hannes Mutschler

The vision of our group is the de novo engineering of self-replicating and evolving biomimetic systems, which are unburdened by the complexity of contemporary biology. We address this challenge with a bottom-up approach using reconstituted protein and nucleic acid components. Furthermore, we are interested in the Origin of Life and the potential of short RNAs to catalyze biochemical reactions under extreme, but prebiotically plausible conditions. To achieve our goals, we will employ a variety of biochemical methods ranging from standard protein and nucleic acid production / purification to more demanding applications such as design, assembly, characterization and evolution of complex protein machineries and ribozymes.