Discover Engineering life
EnLife aims at a better understanding of “what differentiates living systems from inert systems and how we can build them”. The main ambition of the EnLife program is to design and study the emergence of the functions within living systems from the bottom up.
The Engineering Life (EnLife) Major Program will bring researchers from 13 laboratories in the PSL ecosystem to build an ambitious project on artificial living systems, with the aims of enabling new methods, inventing technologies, and creating theoretical models that can inform scientists on how to use the “building bricks” of life to construct living organisms from scratch. EnLife is a cross disciplinary project with strong roots in quantitative science (e.g., physics, biology, computer science, and chemistry) that aspires to build on the existing expertise of Institut Curie, École normale supérieure - PSL, ESPCI Paris - PSL, Collège de France and Chimie ParisTech - PSL to address the general questions of “what distinguishes life from non-living matter?” and “to what extent we can artificially recreate living systems from scratch?”.
We will leverage an original approach based on an iterative design, build, test, and learn cycle, which make it possible to both obtain a comprehensive understanding of the functions of living systems and to create such functions from scratch, by reusing the elementary blocks of living systems, from DNA to cells and tissues. This approach, which relies on theoretical descriptions and data analysis as well as quantitative measurements, will hold the key to expanding the interface of physics and biology at PSL into the novel frontier of “understanding by building” living systems.
The primary actions of the EnLife Program will be to encourage novel interactions between PSL research teams, to support high-risk/high-gain early-stage research, and to leverage the results of this research to apply for national and international grants.