Active
Predictive agency in Capsaspora
Testing how a unicellular relative of animals uses environmental cues to prepare for future stress.
Related workMolecular systems biology · Barcelona
Fascinated with life, ideas, and complexity.
Maor Knafo
Postdoctoral Researcher · IBE (CSIC–UPF), Barcelona
I study how cells sense, remember, adapt, and form useful models of a changing world.
About
The strange logic of life
My name is Maor Knafo, and it’s hard to describe myself without letting my passion for living systems spill through the seams. Even as a kid, I ran around with snakes and lizards in my backpack—and the occasional insect in my pocket. That restless curiosity stayed with me, maturing into a scientific drive to understand the strange logic of life.
I’m currently a postdoc in the MCG group at IBE Barcelona. My work focuses on how biological systems regulate themselves, and how stress disrupts, rewires, or even teaches them. I see this not just as survival, but as a kind of learning, often embedded in the simplest forms of life.
Lately, I’ve been drawn to a deeper question: how organisms form internal models of the world, and how those models shape what cells do. That intersection, between perception and function, is where I work, and where I wonder.
Recurring questions
A growing set of ideas connecting single-cell behavior, evolution, and collective life.
01
Predictive agency
How living systems use present information to prepare for likely futures.
02Basal cognition
The minimal capacities through which cells sense, remember, and choose.
03Population heterogeneity
Why variation among cells can become a collective adaptive resource.
04Multicellular transitions
How coordination and conflict shape the move from one cell to many.
From the desk
Active research and recent writing, populated directly from the site’s Markdown collections.
Current work
In development
Closed-loop culturing of difficult organisms
Developing low-cost experimental systems that learn from failed cultures and optimize environmental histories, not only recipes.
Related workRecently completed
Stress-induced heterogeneity and early adaptation
Investigating when variation in protein expression gives populations multiple adaptive avenues—and when stress instead produces generic survival.
Related workReducible Beauty
Learning to Culture the Uncultured
We can now sequence almost anything. That does not mean we can touch it. Most of the microbial world still sits on the far side of cultivation: named…
3D printers are inherently anti-developmental (but are huge fun and you should definitely get one)
I love 3D printing. I'm fascinated with it to the point where the stuff I make is, sometimes, almost meaningless. I love the designing part the most, all…
The Cell Dreams Wrong
At the edge of function and noise, when the core machinery breaks down, there is a kind of dream. Not the random twitch of unconscious molecules, but…