BPCPPDYSOE21 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 24: Poster B: Active Biological Matter, Cell Mechanics, Systems Biology, Computational Biophysics, etc.

BP 24.8: Poster

Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 16:00–18:30, BPp

Light-powered reactivation of flagella and contraction of microtubules network: towards building an artificial cell — Raheel Ahmad, Vahid Nasirimarekhani, Albert Bae, Samira Goli, Yu-Jung Su, Eberhard Bodenschatz, Isabella Guido, and •Azam Gholami — MPI for Dynamics and Self-organization, Göttingen, Germany

The bottom-up assembly of such systems in the context of synthetic biology is still a challenging task. In this paper, we demonstrate biocompatibility and efficiency of an artificial light-driven energy module and a motility functional unit by integration of light-switchable photosynthetic vesicles with demembranated flagella, thereby supplying ATP for dynein molecular motors upon illumination. Flagellar propulsion is coupled to its beating frequency and light- driven dynamic synthesis of ATP allows us to control beating frequency of flagella as a function of illumination. Additionally, we verified the functionality of light-powered synthetic vesicles in in vitro motility assays by encapsulation of microtubules assembled with force-generating kinesin-1 motors and energy module to investigate dynamics of a contractile filamentous network in cell-like compartments by optical stimulation. Integration of this photosynthetic system with different biological building blocks such as cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors may contribute to the bottom-up synthesis of artificial cells that are able to undergo motor-driven morphological deformations and exhibit directional motion in a light-controllable fashion. *In collaboration with C. Kleineberg, K. Sundmacher, and T. Vidakovich-Koch from MPI-Magdeburg.