果冻传媒

Madelief鈥檚 current research interests include liquid-liquid phase separation, membraneless organelles, compartmentalization, and supramolecular chemistry. Compartmentalization is one of the hallmarks of dynamic living systems. This includes the cell being a compartment by itself, but also the subcellular compartments found in cells, such as (membraneless) organelles which can have substructures themselves. Advantages of compartmentalization can be the simultaneous coexistence of distinct chemical environments, the build-up of chemical gradients, the maintenance of non-equilibrium states, and the isolation of components that would otherwise be incompatible with one another. In order to understand, mimic, or reproduce life it is useful to incorporate this hallmark into synthetic cellular platforms. For the engineering of such multi-compartment synthetic cells, (amylose-based) coacervate protocells are used in which phase-separating biomolecules are incorporated. These molecules can form phase separated compartments under specific conditions and can be, for example, DNA or Intrinsically Disordered Regions (IDRs). In order to show the functionality of the engineered compartments, assays are developed that make use of the simultaneous coexistence of distinct chemical environments, or the isolation of components. This is supposed to lead to intercellular as well as intracellular communication.