Research Assistant; Zuercher Lab - Generative Biology Insititute

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we're on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity's greatest challenges in four transformative areas.

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you'll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society.

Led by Founding Director Jason Chin, the Generative Biology Institute (GBI) at the Ellison Institute of Technology is tackling the key challenges in making biology engineerable and thereby unlocking the unrivalled power of biology for the benefit of humanity.

We are seeking ambitious, creative, and highly skilled Postdoctoral Researchers to join the Zuercher Lab  Zuercher Lab, led by Principal Investigator Jerome Zuercher, focuses on two interconnected areas, with many projects involving aspects of both topics (Genome synthesis and Genetic Isolation).

A direct consequence of the universality of the genetic code is the possibility for genetic information to be transferred between evolutionarily distant species. Such horizontal transfer of genetic information, as opposed to vertical genetic transfer, is common in nature and has shaped evolution over billions of years. In the context of genetic engineering, the potential for genetic spillover is highly concerning, and preventing interference of artificial genetic information with natural biology is critical to allow biotechnological progress to be both safe and ambitious.

Biotechnology will play a central role in addressing pressing challenges in food security, pharmaceutical development, sustainable fuel sources, and efficient carbon fixation. Essential parts of the economy will increasingly rely on bioproduction facilities harbouring tailor‑made microbes, making extreme reliability essential. However, engineered organisms are as susceptible to viral invasion as natural organisms, and a single viral particle entering a bioproduction facility can force operational shutdown.

Altering the genetic code of a cell provides an opportunity to render natural and synthetic genetic information incompatible. This breakthrough offers a means to protect the environment from genetically engineered organisms and, vice versa, to protect engineered organisms critical for bioproduction from viral invasion. Through concerted efforts in genome recoding and translational engineering, the first organism with a synthetic genetic code was created, speaking a different language than organisms found in nature, and is genetically isolated;

it can neither give nor receive genetic information from the environment.

The lab continues the development of altered genetic codes to increase the safety of biotechnology and aims to rewrite even the most complex biological systems in alternative synthetic genetic codes.

Our ability to write DNA has recently expanded to the genomic scale. The possibility of defining every single base in the genome of a cell enables manipulation of the most fundamental cellular properties, such as the genetic code.

Current genome synthesis methods are slow, narrow in scope, and limited in scale. To date, genomes of only two bacteria have been successfully synthesized. This project aims to develop methodologies to make the synthesis of model organism genomes (e.g.,

E. coli) more rapid and to enable synthesis of the genomes of non‑model bacteria, broadening the scope of genome synthesis.

The ability to routinely synthesize the genomes of a diverse set of organisms will not only allow reprogramming of the genetic code but also facilitate testing of generative genome designs.…