Executive Director

For nearly fifty years, biology concentrated on the ~2% of the human genome that codes for proteins and dismissed the remaining 98% as “junk.” Our research program rests on the conviction that this was one of the great misreadings in modern science — and on the demonstrated reality that the genome’s dark matter is a vast, untapped reservoir of functional molecules waiting to be designed. The founding result came in 2009, when our group provided the first experimental proof that functional proteins can be synthesized from naturally silent, non-coding DNA — building non-natural parts from natural genomic templates. What began as a single experiment has, over fifteen years, grown into a sustained discovery platform. The dark genome come into two functional categories. Type I — non-expressing DNA — comprises intergenic regions, antisense strands, reverse open reading frames, repetitive elements, and pseudogenes. Type II — non-translating RNA — comprises introns, ribosomal and transfer RNA, microRNA, and long non-coding RNA. Conventional biology treats both as silent; our work shows that, once computationally decoded and synthetically expressed, both yield novel, bioactive peptides, proteins, and pathways. The evidence has accumulated across diseases: anti-malarial and anti-Alzheimer’s peptides predicted from intergenic sequences, functional proteins reconstructed from pseudogenes, antimicrobial peptides from Drosophila non-coding DNA, and anti-cancer activity from E. coli intergenic-derived peptides. A flagship discovery is a class we named tRNA-encoded peptides (tREPs): tREP-18 showed potent antileishmanial activity at nanomolar concentrations (IC₅₀ ≈ 22 nM) while remaining safe to human cells — the first evidence that transfer RNA, long considered purely non-coding, can be repurposed into therapeutically relevant molecules. Together these results point to what I call Functional Genomics 2.0 — a shift from studying individual genes to treating the entire non expressing genome as a design canvas. . Our long-term goal is to establish the dark matter of the genome as a foundational source of new biology: a systematic route to first-in-class therapeutics, enzymes, and pathways drawn not from outside the body, but from the unread instructions already within our genomes. This is not a footnote to molecular biology — it is a new design dimension for it, and a roadmap for the next generation of experimental and computational biologists.