RSC Prizewinner's Talk: Microfluidics and engineered biomembranes as enabling technologies in synthetic cell design

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• Dr. Yuval Elani, Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London
• Thursday 05 December 2024, 14:00-15:00
• Dept. of Chemistry, Pfizer Lecture Theater.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sharon Connor.

Synthetic cells (SynCells) are bioinspired micromachines constructed from molecular building blocks, mimicking the form and function of biological cells. They are increasingly used as both simplified cell models and engineered microdevices, offering broad applications in industrial and clinical biotechnology. Despite their promise, SynCells are structurally simplistic, primarily consisting of spherical liposomes, unlike their biological counterparts. Given that form and function are intertwined, this lack of architectural complexity restricts the development of more sophisticated behaviours. In this talk, I will discuss our recent efforts to overcome these limitations by employing microfluidic assembly lines for SynCell production, enabling the creation of a wide repertoire of SynCell architectures [1][2]. We harness this increased complexity to create a new generation of SynCells with biomimetic behaviours, most notably those capable of detecting external stimuli (including as temperature, light, and magnetic fields) and initiating a biochemical response [3][4][5]. Additionally, we have recently expanded our toolkit to access the nano-regime, allowing us to construct nano-organelles for multi-stage release of different payloads at defined time points and to develop attolitre bio-reactors for in situ biochemical synthesis [6].

1. Ioannou, Ion A., et al. “Nucleated synthetic cells with genetically driven intercompartment communication.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121.36 (2024): e2404790121. 2. Zubaite, Greta, et al. “Dynamic reconfiguration of subcompartment architectures in artificial cells.” ACS nano 16.6 (2022): 9389-9400. 3. Monck, Carolina et al. “Genetically programmed synthetic cells for thermo-responsive protein synthesis and cargo release.” Nature Chemical Biology (2024): doi.org/10.1038/s41589-024-01673-7 4. Zhu, Karen K., et al. “Magnetic Modulation of Biochemical Synthesis in Synthetic Cells.” Journal of the American Chemical Society 146.19 (2024): 13176-13182. 5. Gispert, Ignacio, et al. “Stimuli-responsive vesicles as distributed artificial organelles for bacterial activation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119.42 (2022): e2206563119. 6. Pilkington, Colin P., et al. “Engineering a nanoscale liposome-in-liposome for in situ biochemical synthesis and multi-stage release.” Nature Chemistry (2024): doi.org/10.1038/s41557-024-01584-z 7. Allen, Matthew E., et al. “Hydrogels as functional components in artificial cell systems.” Nature Reviews Chemistry 6.8 (2022): 562-578.

This talk is part of the Materials Chemistry Research Interest Group series.

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