From molecules to life: building cells from scratch

Date

Jan 16, 2025

Time

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Speaker

Dora Tang

Affiliation

Saarland University

Series

MPI-CBG Thursday Seminar

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Host

Anne Grapin-Botton

Description

One of the goals of bottom-up synthetic biology is to build living cells from scratch. Biology is well equipped in exploiting a large number of out-of-equilibrium processes to support life. A complete understanding of these mechanisms is still in its infancy due to the complexity and number of the individual components involved in the reactions. However, a bottom-up approach allows us to replicate key biological processes using a small number of basic building blocks. Moreover, this methodology has the added advantage that properties and characteristics of the artificial cell can be readily tuned and adapted. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the strategies we adopt in our lab to build living systems from scratch that rely on compartmentalisation as the defining feature to support out-of-equilibrium behaviour. Specifically, I will talk about the design and synthesis of artificial cells based on liquid-liquid phase separation (coacervation) and hydrophobic effects such as lipid vesicles and proteinosomes and describe how these compartments may be used as platforms for implementing dynamic biological behaviours including: RNA catalysis and communication. I propose that our bottom-up approaches are effective in establishing living systems from scratch and in doing so provide unique model systems that can help to unravel the physico-chemical principles of living systems.

Last modified: Jan 16, 2025, 7:36:55 AM