Dresden 2011 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 7: Posters: Statistical Physics in Biological Systems

BP 7.20: Poster

Montag, 14. März 2011, 17:15–20:00, P3

Protocells: From a Closed to an Opened System — •Hans Kubitschke and Claus Fütterer — Institut für Experimentalphysik I, Universität Leipzig, Linnéstraße 5, 04009 Leipzig

Nutrition and energy management is crucial for preventing an early protocell to run into the thermodynamic equilibrium with lethal consequences. But cell membranes per se are impermeable to many required molecules and hence a controlled passage possibility for nutritive substances as amino acids or nucleotides has to be realized to escape starvation. How this is accomplished is not only an indispensable element of the development of the first cells but also a surprisingly simple but very sensitive (since amplification due to feed-back is involved) bioreactor suited for high throughput screening of the properties of all components: transcription apparatus, membrane pore, phospholipids, co-expressed other proteins. The system can be used to measure processing rates of enzymes, flux and effective diffusion coefficients membrane pores. Noireaux and Libchaber published experimental results in 2004 integrating a transcription apparatus into a vesicle expressing pores getting spontaneously inserted into the vesicle membrane. This work inspired our basic model describing the dynamics of pore proteins and the transcription dynamics, which we present here. The set of ordinary non-linear differential equations balance membrane pore generation due to gene expression, allowing to keep metabolism alive, against its degradation due to blockage or chemical destruction. Integration of other properties allows to extend the model conveniently to various other assays.