PhD in Chemical Engineering

Do you want to design and construct synthetic life-like cells? A major goal of synthetic biology is to create life-like artificial cells from non-living components, i.e. the bottom-up approach. This exciting project will focus on designing, constructing, and testing synthetic cells with multiple sub-compartments. Just like their living counterparts (i.e. eukaryotic cells), synthetic cells with different inner compartments allow multiple and advanced functionalities. /n The building blocks will be lipid vesicles, both large unilamellar vesicles (LUVs) and giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs), as well as membrane embedded and encapsulated proteins. To do so, the student will develop methodologies for lipid vesicle formation, including bulk techniques such as water-in-oil emulsions, and microfluidic systems (e.g. micro-droplets). Bottom-up synthetic cells can shed light on natural biological cell functions but can also be used for future industrial applications like biofuel production or in biomedical applications such as drug delivery. /n Possible outcomes and goals: /n Studying the interaction of collections of synthetic cells (i.e. proto-tissues) for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications. /n Setting-up enzymatic reactions between sub-compartments to model and understand eukaryotic cellular metabolism. /n Developing new microfluidic tools to construct multi-compartment synthetic cells for drug delivery applications.