BPCPPDYSOE21 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 23: Focus Biological Cells in Microfluidics II

BP 23.4: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 15:00–15:30, BPc

Synthetic cells: De novo assembly with microfluidics and DNA nanotechnology — •Kerstin Göpfrich — Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Jahnstr. 29, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany

The future of manufacturing entails the construction of biological systems and synthetic cells from the bottom up. Instead of relying exclusively on biological building blocks, the integration of new tools and new materials may be a shortcut towards the assembly of active and eventually fully functional synthetic cells [Göpfrich et al., Trends Biotechnol., 2018]. This is especially apparent when considering recent advances in DNA nanotechnology and microfluidics. Exemplifying this approach, we use microfluidics for the assembly of synthetic cellular compartments that we equip with natural or synthetic cytoskeletons. Light serves as a non-invasive stimulus to trigger their symmetry-breaking contraction [Jahnke et al., Adv. Biosys., 2020; Adv. Funct. Mater., 2019]. We further demonstrate the division of giant unilamellar lipid vesicles (GUVs) as synthetic cell models based on phase separation and osmosis rather than the biological building blocks of a cell’s division machinery. We derive a parameter-free analytical model which makes quantitative predictions that we verify experimentally [Dreher et al., Angew. Chem., 2020]. Remarkably, we show that caged compounds provide full spatio-temporal control to increase the osmolarity locally in an illuminated area, such that a target-GUV undergoes division whereas the surrounding GUVs remain unaffected. All in all, we believe that precision technologies, like microfluidics, can help to accelerate synthetic biology research.