Are you an “artist, designer, biohacker, or other cultural practitioner” who’s interested in synthetic biology? You could spend 4-6 weeks in Zurich at the Bioprocess Laboratory, where you will “actively engage with scientists working on a synthetic biology related project with focus on the design of antibiotics.”
The gig pays up to €7,000, along with travel, lodgings and living expenses.
In SYNPEPTIDE, a team of researchers from Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands and Austria aims to design new modified peptides with antibiotic activities through careful analyses of natural processes and applying these insights to synthetic biology. We want to find novel antibiotics in order to help fight pathogenic strains with multi-drug resistance. Peptides are among the most versatile products that nature provides to cater for a broad set of biotechnological applications, ranging from antibiotics to personal hygiene. Their diversity comes from a broad variety of posttranslational modifications that is used to provide additional functionality, beyond what is possible with the classic proteinogenic set of 20 amino acids. In SYNPEPTIDE, we want to recruit such additional functionality for rational molecular design purposes in order to facilitate the design and the production of synthetic peptides.You, as the artist in residence, will interact with scientists in the laboratory in Basel as well as with the team at Biofaction in Vienna, in order to ignite a cross-disciplinary exchange. You will learn and engage with the current research, connect it to your own practice, as well as to wider societal and cultural aspects, in order to create a body of work, to be presented at the end of the residency.
Call for Artist in Residence, Bioprocess Laboratory, Zurich [Beyond the Beyond]
(Images: DNA stub, Alai, CC-BY-SA)
