NIBRT Principal Investigator Dr Alan Costello has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant worth €1.86 million for a research project that aims to expand what living cells can be engineered to produce.
The five-year project, TO-CODES – Creating a bilingual organism with Two mutually Orthogonal genetic CODES – will explore whether a living cell can operate with two separate genetic decoding systems.
The award is NIBRT’s first ERC grant and marks an important milestone in the Institute’s growing international research profile. It will also support the expansion of Dr Costello’s research team with three PhD students and a postdoctoral researcher.
Creating a “bilingual” cell
Cells use ribosomes and transfer RNA (tRNA) to translate genetic information into proteins. TO-CODES aims to engineer two distinct ribosome–tRNA systems that can operate independently within the same cell.
This could allow one system to maintain the cell’s essential functions while the other is adapted to perform new ones. The research could enable the production of biopolymers with new chemistries, opening applications for drug discovery and biomanufacturing across traditional biopharma and advanced therapeutics.
Dr Costello returned to Ireland from the Scripps Institute in 2024 to establish his independent research group at NIBRT. His work combines synthetic biology, directed evolution and cellular translation research.
ERC Starting Grants support early-career researchers in developing ambitious independent research programmes and building their own teams. TO-CODES will begin in January 2027 and continue until December 2031.
Further information is available on the European Commission’s CORDIS project page.
