PhD Position Synthetic Cells (MSCA DN SigSynCell) M/F

SIGSYNCELL is a doctoral network funded by the European Commission via Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), whose goal is training through research. It is a consortium that brings together a dozen European academic partners, in addition to private companies, coordinated by the CNRS in Bordeaux (F).

Current biotechnology solutions based on living cells bear the intrinsic limitations that cells are subject to the random process of Natural Evolution, a major drawback for technological applications. Biotechnologies also need to demonstrate that they can be embedded into environmental life cycles to become sustainable options. The construction of synthetic cells therefore emerges as a ground-breaking new biotechnology that can overcome the limitation of current biotechnology solutions. Early forms of life have spontaneously emerged from non-living matter in prebiotic processes involving self-assembly, self-organization and elementary chemical reactivity in confined spaces. We now have at hand in the laboratory the tools to study these processes and elucidate their role in living systems. We are therefore now at a time where we can find and implement a generic framework for the construction of cellular systems from basic principles and elementary building blocks. In the consortium SIGSYNCELL, we want to develop synthetic cells as systems having the key characteristics function of living systems: their capacity to interact with their environment. In a laboratory environment, both the cells and the environment can be fully engineered to gradually control and build up the complexity of synthetic cell systems.

Chemical communication in living cells relies on a precisely coordinated compartmentalization of reactions. Membraneless organelles formed by liquid-liquid phase separation play a key role in this dynamic orchestration. Here, we will design light-responsive coacervates as membraneless organelles mimics to control the spatial distribution of biomolecules (enzymes, substrates, oligopeptides) and the efficacy of cascade biochemical reactions. These dynamic coacervates will serve as artificial organelles to switch metabolic activities in synthetic cells. In particular, we will focus on controllable coacervate organization and biomolecule localization via light-switchable phase transitions, demonstrate switchable enzyme reactions via light-responsive coacervation, develop a microfluidic platform to quantify biomolecular partitioning and enzyme kinetics in coacervates and incorporate coacervate switches in giant unilamellar vesicles.