Wow!🤩.

RT @SupraLife_EU: 🗣️ @BoekhovenLab is Associate Professor in the Bioscience Department at the @TU_Muenchen 🇩🇪. 🎯 His research focuses on #m….

RT @giuliosflask: Pumping molecules without a pump? . Back-to-back with @BoekhovenLab, we describe minimal systems that use chemical energ….

RT @BoekhovenLab: Check out Monika Wenisch's work published in @Chem_CP!. We’ve engineered synthetic cells that emerge, grow, and produce o….

I'm very grateful for the smooth collaboration and funding by the @ERC_Research, the ORIGINS cluster, and the Max Planck School @mattertolife.

In future work, we will endow them with replicators as a genotype. That way, the "mother" droplet passes on information molecules to the next generation. That work is under review here:.

The offspring are short-lived without fuel. But! We can save them by timing our refueling right. Together with Henrike's team (@HNiederho), we developed microfluidic devices that enable us to refuel the next generation and keep them "alive".

When the droplets contain both long and short polymers, the long polymers aggregate into the tiny speckles—the future offspring. As the droplet runs out of fuel, it decays, and the speckles are liberated as offspring.

We developed fuel-dependent synthetic cells—droplets that require fuel to emerge and sustain themselves. When you forget to feed them, they will decay. We have now figured out how they can produce offspring.

Check out Monika Wenisch's work published in @Chem_CP!. We’ve engineered synthetic cells that emerge, grow, and produce offspring autonomously, powered by chemical fuel. A significant stride towards synthetic life. (Movie by Leonie Kauling).

RT @Ahanjit: Exciting work from @BoekhovenLab and @HNiederho . Toward synthetic life—Emergence, growth, creation of offspring, decay, and r….

RT @Chem_CP: Online now: Toward synthetic life—Emergence, growth, creation of offspring, decay, and rescue of fuel-dependent synthetic cell….

RT @BoekhovenLab: How can a cell control the size of its organelles?. Excited to share a mechanism to control droplet size we recently foun….

RT @FedeFrateloreto: Looking for an easy way to transiently change the conductivity of water? .Check this out!.| Transient Changes in Condu….

RT @ZS_biophys: Now published😀.

RT @WebersGroup: You can find us here @m-pol.bsky.social 😀.

Super grateful for the longstanding collaboration with @WebersGroup and the hard work by Judit Sastre and Advait Thatte!.

Excitingly, when we allow the droplets to fuse, the emulsion starts oscillations between periods of small and large droplets. Tiny droplets rain down and fuse at the bottom. There, the large droplets shrink and new tiny droplets nucleate on top.

If influx scales with surface area and efflux with volume, tiny droplets grow and big ones should shrink. That's exactly what we see in the experiments. Droplets adjust their size until they are all the same size.

We build "active" droplets to test a hypothesis: Chemical reactions can regulate droplet size. In our active droplets, molecules are activated outside the droplet, while deactivated in the droplet. That way, influx scales with surface area and efflux scales with volume.