César Ramírez Sarmiento

Yeah, I mean, something that's very interesting about Sleep Token is that they combine different music genres into like one piece, right?

They combine from like hip-hop and...

jazz and soul and R&B and metal and deathcore.

It's like everything just mixed into one piece of music.

And I think of the work that we do in the lab and our collaborations with other people from my country and also from other countries as something similar, that we're trying to

put a lot of effort into like combining different things to think out of the box and do something different from what we have done in the past which has been only learning about proteins and then characterizing them now we're thinking more about oh what if we like put this protein in a cell and then we do whatever we were thinking about doing with just proteins now we do it with like living cells and

we provide a solution for that.

Yeah, actually, one of the things that we were thinking about a lot with one of my colleagues in Chile is about how to create new proteins to put them into cells that are very resilient to conditions in mining so that we can use them for bioleaching, which is like trying to recover different minerals using biotechnological solutions.

And those are kind of the things that it's like...

Try to combine very disparate scientific endeavors into one piece and then try to see if that works or not.

I think one of the cases that we're seeing a lot of impact right now is in the elimination of pollutants from the environment or trying to develop technologies to do so.

And so there's a few companies that are working now on...

degrading plastic, and these proteins that perform chemical reactions are called enzymes.

And enzyme design is a problem of its own that is very difficult to tackle, but there's one company in France and there's another company in China that are working on developing, with the use of AI, different enzymes that can actually degrade different types of plastics.

And the idea behind it is that we are then using that plastic

as a feedstock for creating new plastic afterwards so the enzymes what they will do is like they will decompose the plastic into small molecules that you can use them for making new plastic afterwards in the best scenario will be like an infinite recycling process and that would be like great for humanity and how does it work exactly can you tell us a few more details

So biological information goes from gene, which is on any living cell's genome.

So that's DNA, and DNA encodes proteins.

So we go from DNA to proteins.

What you do in the computer is that you go from protein back to DNA.