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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 20: Posters - Physics of the Genesis of Life (Focus Session)

BP 20.6: Poster

Dienstag, 21. März 2017, 14:00–16:00, P1A

Peptide-based vesicles as precursors to protocells — •Kilian Vogele, Marisa Götzfried, Elisabeth Falgenhauer, Friedrich C. Simmel, and Tobias Pirzer — Systems Biophysics and Bionanotechnology E14, Physics-Department and ZNN, TU Muenchen, 85748 Garching, Germany

Commonly stated requirements for protocells are the maintenance of a metabolism, sensing and responding to the environment, the capability for self-reproduction and Darwinian evolution. In order to meet these requirements compartmentalization is often regarded as an essential aspect. In the lab, protocellular compartmentalization is typically modelled with self-assembled vesicles, for which various molecular components such as fatty acids, lipids or amphiphilic peptides have been utilized. Here we use synthetic elastin-like polypeptides (ELP) to create self-assembled peptide vesicle structures. Among their advantages are tunability in size, permeability and stimuli-responsiveness. The ELP vesicles are fabricated by rehydration from glass beads and have a size of about 200 nm, as observed by DLS and TEM. Using flow cytometry and spectroscopy, we demonstrate successful encapsulation of GFP and fluorescent DNA in the polymersomes, and we also show transcription of the fluorescent RNA aptamer dBroccoli inside of the vesicles. On the long run, we aim at the self-reproduction of ELP vesicles by expression of ELP encoding genes in an artificial transcription-translation (TX-TL) system.