Lennart Hilbert’s group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) explores operation principles and three-dimensional (3D) architectures that support effective information processing with DNA as a material substrate. In the discovery-driven branch of our work, we visualize the inner workings of the cell nucleus in stem cells and developing zebrafish embryos with live and super-resolution microscopy. To systematically understand what we see, we apply and also develop machine learning and artificial intelligence-based image analysis approaches. We complement data analysis with molecular dynamics and biophysics simulations, allowing us to advance from specific observations to generally applicable and transferable operation principles and system architectures. Our fundamental research work feeds into the rational and computer-guided design of synthetic systems, which exemplify how the operation principles we learned from living systems can be exploited towards digital, sequence-based programming of biomedical technologies. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to cell-embedded DNA computing and the predictive design of future DNA-based computer hardware.
Our laboratory is part of the Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems – Biological Information Processing (IBCS-BIP), a multi-disciplinary center of biological research at KIT. Lennart Hilbert is life time-tenure full Professor of Systems Biology/Bioinformatics, acting as Department leader at IBCS-BIP with a teaching affiliation at the Zoological Institute of KIT. We are also embedded in the BioInterfaces International Graduate School as well as the Helmholtz Information and Data Science School for Health (HIDSS4Health).
Our group is core-funded through the Helmholtz Association Program “Natural, Artificial and Cognitive Information Processing”. Additionally, our group is associated with and partially receives funds from the Center for Synthetic Genomics SynGen. Further funding is obtained through the German Research Foundation (DFG),
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