PhD position - Synthetic Cell (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.

This PhD project focuses the fabrication and manipulat giant lipid vesicles with diverse architectures for motility, reconfiguration and signaling under external stimuli. We will develop signaling mechanisms through the integration and actuation of magnetic and light-responsive nanoparticles. This interdisciplinary research bridges soft matter physics, chemistry, and biophysics, aiming to advance biomimetic systems for applications in drug delivery and synthetic biology. The selected candidate should have a physico-chemical background, preferentially with lipid vesicles or similar systems (although not mandatory).