SKM 2023 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 5: Focus Session NanoAgents

BP 5.2: Vortrag

Montag, 27. März 2023, 15:30–15:45, TOE 317

Remodelling DNA filaments for bottom-up synthetic biology — •Maja Illig¹, Kevin Jahnke^1,2, Marlene Scheffold¹, Hauke Drechsler³, Stefan Diez³, and Kerstin Göpfrich¹ — ¹MPI for Medical Research, Heidelberg, Germany — ²Harvard University, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Cambridge, MA, USA — ³TU Dresden, Center for Molecular Bioengineering (B CUBE), Dresden, Germany

The control of filamentous cytoskeletal systems is one of the dedicated aims of bottom-up synthetic biology to engineer self-dividing synthetic cells and equip them with mechanical cell-to-cell communication pathways. A molecular engineering approach to achieve specific functionality from the nanoscale to the microscale requires programmability in order to design self-assembly.

This work reinforces how DNA nanotechnology paves the way to create biocompatible nanostructures that can mimic cellular entities. Here, we demonstrate the remodelling of entirely synthetic filaments made from DNA nanotubes: (i) Towards bottom-up synthetic cell division, we can rationally design a ring structure made from bundled filaments. We can control the ring formation by engineering of a synthetic crosslinking peptide and we further constrict the ring diameter by external triggers. (ii) Towards mechanotactic synthetic cells, a transmembrane signalling pathway enables the reconfiguration of the cytoskeleton made from DNA filaments. The stimulus-induced clustering of transmembrane entities results in mechanical remodelling of the internal DNA cytoskeleton (Jahnke, Illig et al. Biorxiv 2022).