Johannes Kabisch

Through the processes of evolution bacteria have developed to survive the harshest of environments. One of the strategies is to protect their blueprint for life, their DNA, in so called spores. These dormant spores can persist for thousands of years and upon encountering a sustainable environment return to a normal life and propagate. We are in daily contact with such spores, some are used as probiotics helping us to recover our intestinal flora, while others are being used as a bio-friendly means to support agriculture. The PolySpore project will use this naturally evolved “DNA-safe” as a platform to develop novel, extremly strong materials as well as biological super-hard drives allowing us to safely store DNA-encoded data protected by the spores.