A team of researchers from Faculty of Science has been awarded a prestigious renewal of their HFSP Grant

Klára Hlouchová, Ph.D., photo by Luboš Wišniewski, UK Media

A Young Investigator grant has been led in the years 2019-2023 by the group of Klara Hlouchova (Department of Cell Biology, IOCB Prague, BIOCEV), joined by two other researchers - Kosuke Fujishima (Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo) and Stephen Fried (John Hopkins University, Baltimore). This team has just been granted a prestigious 3-year renewal which is awarded only rarely and based on great performance and project suitability. The team was also approved to be joined by a new member – Stephen Freeland (University of Maryland Baltimore County).

The main aim of the follow-up project is to find out whether life could have been built on proteins with a different alphabet of building blocks, or the current alphabet of proteinogenic amino acids is an optimal solution because of biophysical and evolutionary constraints. The team plans to synthesize peptides and proteins using xeno-alphabets that will search different aspects of chemical space. This is expected to provide clues about the possibility of life emerging in other places in the Universe. At a more specific level, the project involves the exploration of unknown regions of chemical space, which may have relevant biotechnological implications as well.

The project relies on the synergy of the researchers’ different disciplines that are connected by the team’s mutual interest in the origins of life, astrobiology, and synthetic life.