MPI-DS Colloquium: Synthetic soft matter with life-like properties

Compared to their living counterparts, synthetic materials may lack some of the key fea-tures of living systems such as capability to grow, adapt, transform, evolve and/or move under fixed physiological conditions, many times consuming energy to maintain them-selves in some interesting out-of-equilibrium states. In this talk, I will show our attempts to build synthetic soft matter systems where some of these properties can emerge, at least partially. This includes the formation of dissipative or living colloidal crystals, as well as DNA nano- and microstructures (DNA origamis, DNA nanotubes) with unique capability to isothermally self-assemble under physiological conditions, evolve and even transform in an adaptive manner, including in the presence of living cells or tissues. I will finally show that synthetic DNA can be more than a structural building block and be advanta-geously used as a versatile designer “genome” to program synthetic soft matter proper-ties, ranging from liquid interface functionalization to probably the first example of genet-ically-encoded surface tension and fluid transport.