The scent of pine trees in the forest, the bright colors of flowers, and even many medicines all have something in common: they come from special plant molecules known as terpenoids and flavonoids.

Flavonoids and terpenoids are natural compounds that give plants their colors, aromas, and protective functions. They also play an important role in our daily lives, because they are found in medicines, flavorings, rubber, and many other useful products.

As demand for these compounds continues to grow in medicine, food, cosmetics, and sustainable materials, the question of how to produce them becomes more and more important. Extracting them directly from plants or making them through chemical synthesis is often expensive, inefficient, and harmful to the environment. With climate change and biodiversity loss, it is more important than ever to produce these molecules in environmentally friendly ways. One promising approach is to use microorganisms as mini-factories to manufacture them sustainably.

The deCYPher project tackles exactly this challenge by combining biotechnology with artificial intelligence to develop smarter, greener methods for producing terpenoids and flavonoids. Instead of harvesting them from nature, we could make them sustainably through biotechnology, supported by AI.

• Learn about terpenoids and flavonoids: what they are and why they matter.
• Discover how AI and biotechnology can enable more environmentally friendly ways to produce them.
• Take part in an interactive citizen-science activity, where you’ll evaluate different compounds based on their relevance and sustainability.
• Talk with scientists and gain exciting insights into current research and sustainable innovation.

Together, we will create a community-generated ranking of flavonoids and terpenoids. The top molecules from this list will be turned into an open-science starter kit.

An open-science kit is a collection of tools, data, and resources that anyone can use freely. It is open, transparent, and easy to reuse. The methods and results are explained clearly so that non-experts can understand them too. Users can take the starter kit as a foundation for their own experiments.

 As part of our open science initiative, our partner Biofaction invited citizens across the EU to decide which plant compounds matter most for them. They rated flavonoids and terpenoids based on what mattered to them – environmentally, socially, personally. The goal is to create a ranked list of compounds, of which the top 3-5 would be used to create open science starter kits.

Over 100 people joined us in Ghent, Vienna, Barcelona and Vilnius to have a conversation about AI, plant compounds, and synthetic biology. We partnered with some fantastic organizations to make it happen: Scivil in Belgium, Science for Change in Spain, and Vilnius University Library in Lithuania. And the event in Austria was hosted by Biofaction.

In Ghent, Scivil with Steve Bers and Jef Van Laer hosted the event on October 25th at a central location close to the main station. Our project lead Marjan de Mey was there in person to represent the scientists and answer questions directly about the research behind the deCYPher project.

Meanwhile in Vienna on October 28th, the Biofaction team – Markus Schmidt, Sandra Youssef, Oi Pui Hoang, and Uliana Reutina – created a welcoming space for dialogue.

In Barcelona, we met on November 3rd at the Jardí del Silenci – a former convent courtyard from the late 19th century that’s now a community garden and gathering space. Joana Magalhães and Sergi López Asensio from Science for Change brought the conversation to life there. It felt like the perfect setting to talk about terpenoids and flavonoids, surrounded by the plants that produce them. 

Over in Vilnius on November 4th, Indra Giraitė for Vilnius University Library hosted participants at the very modern and busy Scientific Communication and Information Center, a central hub for students and faculty alike. A bit outside of the city center the location is surrounded by forest.

These events brought citizens and scientists together to talk about research in ways that actually matter. Our scientists whether in person or online – Marjan de Mey, Cara Deal (Ghent University) and Miguel Romero Durana (Barcelona Supercomputing) – enjoyed attending and responding to some very though questions. While citizens took the opportunity to ask all their questions about synthetic biology.