Designer Blueprints: Synthesising Cellular Controls for Extreme Environments
When we deploy biological systems to Mars or the Moon, we can't bring a team of laboratory technicians to monitor them. Space-bound microbes, engineered plants, and synthetic cells must be autonomous. They need to sense their environment, detect toxic cosmic mutations, regulate their own metabolic pathways, and fight off contamination, all completely on autopilot. How do we program this level of decision-making into raw DNA?
Welcome to Week 3 - The Micro-Frontier: From Extremophiles to Biology-on-a-Chip.
Join us for a cutting-edge webinar titled "Designer Blueprints: Synthesising Cellular Controls for Extreme Environments," featuring award-winning synthetic biologist and deep-tech founder Dr. Antonia Georgieva.
Antonia will take us inside the digital and physical architecture of programmable biology. Moving seamlessly between computational bioinformatics and wet-lab validation, she will reveal how to design and chemically modify functional nucleic acids, specifically antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and rapid, allosteric riboswitches. Discover how these designer molecules function as biological Boolean logic gates, allowing us to synthetically regulate gene expression, build real-time molecular sensors, and engineer advanced countermeasures against antibiotic-resistant bacteria to safeguard off-world agricultural and life-support systems.
What you’ll learn:
Molecular Computing: How to design functional nucleic acids and riboswitches that allow cells to compute, sense, and react to extreme environmental stimuli.
Countering the Resistance: How chemical modifications (like TMO-modifications) optimise antisense oligonucleotides to penetrate and inhibit pathogenic bacteria by up to 90%.
Lab to Market: Strategic insights into bridging academic breakthroughs in RNA-targeted design with commercial agrifood and deep-tech startups.
Whether you are an engineer looking to automate biological payloads or a scientist fascinated by programmable RNA, this session will show you how we are rewriting cellular controls for the extreme frontier.
🎤 About the speaker
Dr. Antonia Georgieva - Founder of Biogaria & Doctoral Researcher, Sofia University
Dr. Antonia Georgieva is an award-winning synthetic biologist, computational biophysicist, and deep-tech entrepreneur. She completed her PhD within the prestigious Laboratory of Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski," focusing on the rational design of chemically modified antisense oligonucleotides and allosteric riboswitches. Recognised at the highest national level, Antonia won First Prize in Bulgaria's "Young and Energetic Scientists" competition and secured 2nd place in the European Union's EWA Startup Competition.
As a double-biotechnology graduate with advanced specialisations in algal biotechnology from the Cambridge Algal Innovation Centre (UK) and chromatography from the University of Plovdiv, Antonia seamlessly blends fundamental scientific discovery with commercial execution. She is the founder of deep-tech ventures Biogaria and Agriffin, where she drives innovation management and strategic partnerships to scale programmable biological solutions for agrifood and industrial biotechnology.