The team consisting of postdoctoral scientists, PhD students, scientific interns, and myself, funded by this ERC project, have made substantial progress on the topic. We developed a model for how cell membranes, as well as membrane and cytoplasmic proteins self-organise under chemical gradients, and have explained how these processes help regulate cell volume, form and maintain subcellular compartments, and drive cell reshaping and cell division. We have developed a model for self-organisation of membrane proteins under mechanical forces and chemical patterns. Of particular focus has been such a self-organisation driven far-from-equilibrium via consumption of energy-rich molecules, in collaboration with experimental partners. We believe these studies will help explain how living systems came to be from non-living molecules, and will help drive the creation of synthetic cells. Our studies have also helped better understand self-assembly of extracellular matrix proteins and their reponse to mechanical forces in several different protein systems. We have invested substantial efforts into understanding how active elastic ESCRT-III filaments, driven by consumption of energy rich molecules, perform work to reshape and divide cells across evolution, from archaea, to yeast and plants, which was published in a series of papers with our experimental collaborators. On the methodological side, we have developed a new framework for studying macromolecular self-organisation by i) coupling evolutionary algorithms with molecular simulations, and ii) by coupling the assembly processes to energy consumption and chemical reactions. Finally, we have studied and identified some important general properties of protein assembly out of equilibrium.
The PI and the group have presented the above results at over 150 international meetings, schools, and institute/departmental visits across Europe, the US, and China.
