Biology across
time & space
Programming biomolecules to record and steer the story of living systems, as it unfolds.
Supported by & in collaboration with
01 Thesis
Life is a story in motion. Most tools only capture a single frame.
Biology is held back by destructive techniques that can only capture snapshots, completely missing the dynamic story that is life. To understand living systems, we must watch their entire journey.
At Irida, we work to record and steer that story. We program biomolecules to act as reporters and actors: DNA, RNA and proteins. We engineer them into cells and build dynamic models to interpret the spatiotemporal data they produce.
02 Platform
Tools & services across the Central Dogma
What we build
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Fluorescent RNA probes
Advanced aptamer tags that unlock RNA dynamics, from exogenous probing strategies to endogenous recombinant expression, with single-molecule precision.
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Engineered cell lines & analysis software
Cells built with our technologies, paired with software that extracts unique insights from spatiotemporal data.
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Datasets
Large-scale datasets of gene-expression regulation across entire cell cycles and in response to perturbations.
How we help
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Biomolecular design
Ultra-high-throughput methods to discover and optimize binders to virtually any target molecule.
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Advanced imaging
From multicolor widefield to SIM, STED and optical-tweezers assays, the most advanced modalities, readily accessible.
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Modeling
Our expertise turns the results of your microscopy experiments into actionable insight.
03 Team
A multidisciplinary team, inside one of London's best research institutes
We span biology, physics, mathematics, chemistry and ML/AI, and work from within the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences.
04 FAQ
Frequently asked questions
They are aptamers that bind a specific dye, switching on its fluorescence so we can see where the RNA goes inside a living cell. They can bind by base complementarity, or be co-expressed to tag endogenous RNA — much like GFP is used to detect proteins.
This works in most cell types, eukaryotes and prokaryotes, and is fully compatible with fluorescent proteins and other reporters.
Our aptamers are formaldehyde-resistant, making them perfectly suited to fixed imaging as well.
We can tag any RNA, coding or non-coding, and figure out where it goes and what it interacts with.
Absolutely! We're pushing the parallelization of this technology to its limits.
