Is it possible to build a cell in the lab?
Yesterday the BioRN Lounge started with this question. Kerstin Göpfrich, professor at Heidelberg University at the Center for Molecular Biology (ZMBH) and head of the Max Planck Research Group Biophysical Engineering of Life, shared with the audience her vision and work in synthetic biology.
Kerstin and her group aim to create a simpler model of a cell that consists of a lipid vesicle and operates based on an own custom-engineered molecular hardware made from DNA and RNA nanotechnology. She additionally showed the power of two-photon 3D laser printing for synthetic biology, realized mechanisms for vesicle division and build functional DNA-based mimics of cytoskeletons, capable of cargo transport and signal transduction.
Blue skies research can have unexpected application!
Impressions