Who we are
We are a group interested in Life, particularly in how life forms have evolved over time from simpler to more complex metabolic solutions. We aim at covering extant and past microbial diversity mainly by analysing the information stored in microbial genomes.
Our current projects involve studying the evolution of bioenergetics systems, developing of new tools for the automatic identification of proteins from sequence data, and pan-metabolic profiling of the Archaea.
Why/How are we going Green
Most of our research is in-silico thus, our contribution to the carbon footprint is due to extensive data traffic (e.g. million of files transferred between servers, databases and computers), the need to store many Gygabytes of data and our heavy computational analyses. In addition, the exponential increase of data to be analysed, frequently promotes the need to update the computational power at our disposal.
If all energy costs from the manufacturing of the devices and servers, their running operation and later disposal are taken into account, once can easily start summing up the tons of CO2 involved and understand our concerns.
Being aware of the impact our activities have in the environment and to have a greener lab, we plan in the future to invest in equipment with reduced environmental impact, and to recycle, renovate and repair whenever possible. We will continue to be conscious of and to implement data traffic reduction where applicable.
