'What I cannot build, I do not understand.'

 

We're building artificial biology to solve synthesis and compute.

 

Life is chemistry that computes

 

How life began on Earth 4 billion years ago is one of the most important questions in science. The ancient Earth was radically different from today — atmospheric CO₂ was 10-100 times more abundant, free oxygen perhaps a millionth of present levels. Yet the earliest evidence of life appears within just a few hundred million years of Earth's formation.

 

This early life was extraordinarily complex, using the same metabolic, structural and genetic features we see in modern cells. It could synthesize materials and process information with remarkable efficiency and precision. How could such sophistication emerge so quickly? What are we missing?

 

Co-ordination via catalysis

 

This complexity now spans a biosphere extending from kilometers below Earth's surface to kilometers above it. Within this domain, uncountable improbable reactions couple together every second in a dance that continuously generates novelty. For example, in the great oxygenation event 2.4 billion years ago, cyanobacteria profoundly changed the atmosphere making O₂ a major component for the first time. This in turn opened the way to complex multicellular organisms that required the energy that oxidative reactions could provide.

 

Our perspective is that catalysis - today mostly enzyme catalysis - is what makes the unlikely likely. We are not just looking for the materials of early life, we’re modeling the networks and the dance. Biochemistry bends the possibilities into circuits that switch each other on and off, process information, provide feedback and regulation, and coordinate extensively across time and space. Life didn't just need the right molecules; it needed chemistry that could compute. Understanding this transformation from dead matter to living chemistry is the key to building biological and proto-biological systems that can solve problems chemistry alone cannot.

 

The biosphere employs hundreds of millions of finely tuned enzymes evolved over billions of years. Yet we can glimpse simpler, ancestral biochemistry in reconstructed archaic enzymes, cofactors, ribozymes, and other catalysts. Across biology's dazzling diversity, from extremophile archaea to human neurons, metabolic networks show remarkable consistency.

 

Learning from nature 

 

Instead of engineering individual molecules, we're learning to orchestrate molecular networks, using biochemistry’s coordination principles to build systems that are more capable, adaptive, efficient, and intelligent.

 

We use frontier AI, computational chemistry and novel lab techniques to model and probe this complexity, with applications across pharmaceutical manufacture, agriculture, energy, industrial chemistry, biosensing and new forms of computation. We believe understanding and harnessing these processes will allow ten billion of us to thrive while coupled to this planet, and to dream that diverse life will continue to evolve and thrive beyond.