Project description
Generating cell mimics
Living cells function as remarkable machinery, comprising various specialised compartments that perform specific roles. Scientists have long sought to investigate, understand and replicate principles from natural systems, particularly single living cells, for diverse applications. Funded by the European Research Council, the HybCell project aims to learn how cells are organised and to exploit the generated knowledge to engineer minimal cells. Researchers will combine natural and synthetic membranes to create hybrid systems resembling cells or organelles and study membrane permeability and fusion. Using lab-on-chip technology, they will form complex systems for synthetic biology, pharmaceutical and medical applications.
Objective
The overall aim of the here described projects is to learn fundamental characteristics of cellular organization and compartmentalization, in particular the role of the lipid membrane, and to exploit this knowledge for engineering minimal cells with a great impact in the context of synthetic biology and also for pharmaceutical and medical applications. The first major objective aims at combining natural cell membranes with synthetic membranes to form defined hybrid systems with the size of cells or cell organelles. This approach has the intriguing advantage that the membrane receptors or channels are reconstituted in the hybrid cell and remain functional. In consequence, signaling pathways of a cell can be mimicked and therefore, the vesicles can be addressed similar to a cell or can serve as cell-free sensor. The second major objective addresses the challenge to build multi-compartment systems. In a defined number and formulation, smaller compartments are enclosed in a larger vesicle and carry other constituents than the lumen of the larger host vesicles (catalysts or enzymes, respectively; DNA; buffer systems; other active biomolecules). With the acquired fundamental knowledge on membrane permeability and fusion, multi-step reactions can be conducted, where several compartments are involved, just like in a living cell. The key methods to address these challenges are based on lab-on-chip technology that provide the unique potential to systematically investigate membrane properties by allowing precise formation, positioning, manipulation and analysis of the membranes; together with many more advantages such as the fast and controlled fluid supply, the possibility of tailoring the chemical surface patterns and surface topology and the application of electrical fields. Microfluidic platform will allow going far beyond the existing methods in membrane research, so that controlled bottom-up formation of simple to more and more complex systems becomes possible.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencessynthetic biology
- engineering and technologyother engineering and technologiesmicrotechnologylab on a chip
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicstopology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculeslipids
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteinsenzymes
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
8092 Zuerich
Switzerland