LMP Seminar: Cell-free synthetic biology for studying self-organization across scales

Spatial organization is a fundamental design feature of life. To better understand and eventually engineer biological function, we need systems in which compartmentalization and self-organization can be constructed, perturbed, and quantitatively observed. In this talk, I will show how my lab uses cell-free synthetic biology to boot up and control genetically encoded spatial order across length scales. Examples range from the synthesis and assembly of bacteriophages, to micrometer-scale protein condensates, and finally to millimeter-scale trigger waves in communities of communicating artificial cells. Taking a learning-by-building approach, we ask how spatial organization influences biochemical reaction networks, and create tractable experimental platforms for engineering systems that build and organize themselves from genetic instructions.