Theme 2 colloquium by dr. Siddharth Deshpande (WUR): 'A Tale of Two Droplets: from Synthetic Cells to Biosensors' (Lecture)

In thislecture, I willelaborate ontwoexcitingstories from mynewly establishedlab, eachrevolving aroundaspecific typeof droplet.

The first story is about a novel and easy way to make biocompatible containers for synthetic cells. Engineering synthetic cells has a broad appeal, from understanding living cells to designing novel biomaterials for therapeutics and hybrid interfaces.Here,we usephase-separated liquid dropletsand coat it with actin cytoskeleton, an intracellular protein polymer(Fig. 1A). Under the right conditions, the droplets are transformed intocell-sized porous containers, which we call actinosomes. We show the functionality of actinosomes by using them as bioreactors capable of protein synthesis. Actinosomes haveappealing properties like ease-of-production, inherent encapsulation capacity, and an active surface to form multicellular assemblies, with potential in medical and biotechnological applications.