News

Some really nice work from Chang and his hard-working students on using pH/temperature/salt-responsive ELP condensates as membraneless organelles in double emulsions as synthetic containers! Fresh from the press: Elastin-like polypeptide coacervates as reversibly triggerable compartments for synthetic cells

A super-proud and happy moment for me, with Ketan defending his thesis beautifully and getting his doctorate!! Being my first PhD, this day will always be special for me! Heartiest congratulations Ketan, Charlotte, and the rest of the family and friends. What a journey it has been, starting a new lab with you, surviving an entire pandemic, and then coming out with several strong and diverse publications, from making synthetic cell containers and on-chip directed evolution, to phase separation of proteins in tick saliva! All the best with your postdoc in the group of Manolis Chatzigiannakis and great to hear you will still be around in Wageningen collaborating with Costas Nikiforidis and maybe also with us for the microfluidics!

Another cool collaboration, this time involving Han Zuilof and Fedor Miloserdov from Organic Chemistry, is now online in Advanced Science! We show the remarkable self-assembly potential of pillararenes and per fluorinated diacids, using microscopy, crystallography, and microfluidics. What a journey it has been, with a string of master students starting with Thijmen, Kelsey, Tessa, and Pim doing a fantastic work! A worthy finale for Larry, who will soon move to Luxembourg continuing his liquid crystal work in Jan Lagerwall’s lab, on the prestigious MSCA postdoctoral grant that he recently got!

A cool collaboration with Costas Nikiforidis, an expert in oleosins, now published in Small! Oleosins are peculiar amphiphilic plant proteins that stabilise the lipids droplets in cells but we took a creative bioengineering approach and used them to stabilise liquid crystal droplets instead! We show that oleosins can very well stabilise the liquid crystals still allowing them to detect amphiphiles, and in case of chiral droplets, we can detect the oleosins themselves at nM concentrations, making them potential amphiphilic proteins sensors. Great work led by Larry and company!

Was great fun to give a Nanoseminar in Utrecht University at the Soft Condensed Matter group, upon invitation by Lisa Tran. I talked about three different types of droplets corresponding to three exciting stories currently cooking up in the lab!

What a lovely way to start 2024 with a fabulous hot pot dinner, prepared with love by Chang. The extended EmBioSys family, the current and the past students, family and friends, everyone enjoyed to the fullest. Truly ‘gezellig’, as you would say in Dutch! 🙂

Great start to the year with our story of on emergence of a dancing dynamics within a two-component system – just oil droplets floating on water – now online in Advanced Materials Interfaces. Kudos to our master student Noor for her hard and creative work and also to Chang for guiding her along in the lab!

It was a pleasure to give a MISB (Master on Integrative Synthetic Biology) seminar in Madrid and further interact with the inquisitive and enthusiastic students. Thanks Prof. German Rivas for the kind invitation!

It’s the second time that a beautiful liquid crystal image from Larry has been selected as the LC image of the month by ILCS. Congrats Larry!

A nice collaboration with de Vries lab, where we a build a library of elastin-like polypeptides that undergo sharp (less than 0.3 pH units) pH-responsive coacervation. We show its use for engineering synthetic cell compartments, by encapsulating multiple ELPs inside micron-sized vesicles. Congrats to Rob and Ketan!

A fantastic two-day lab trip to Texel. We had everything: a smooth first day with camping, visit to the beach, and a ‘gezzelig’ barbecue into the night. This followed by waking up in the middle (literally!) of the storm, passing a lazy afternoon playing cards for the trains to recover and then somehow ending up at home at 1 ‘o’ clock in the night. The return journey was a challenge, but the group stayed strong and that’s what matters!

A detailed video protocol now published in JoVE on how to set up OLA in your lab! Congrats to Chang and Ketan! 

Another nice work from Larry, where we followed up on our previous amphiphile sensing using liquid crystals. Using both long-pitch and short-pitch cholesterics, we show that it is possible to differentiate between lipids with tiny differences in their tails of merely two carbon atoms. 

We had a very eventful evening at the Christmas market in Düsseldorf! Glühwein and feuerzangenbowle didn’t disappoint and the hot pot dinner in the end was a perfect finale to a crazy evening! A great bunch of fun-loving scientists, from postdocs to bachelor students!

A new face joins our team today! Manali Nandy recently finished her PhD thesis and will now join us to investigate more about the biomolecular condensates using her physical chemistry toolbox. Welcome Manali!

Ketan’s actinosome is now published open access! A new approach towards making synthetic cell containers, using the interactions between actin cytoskeleton and biomolecular condensates. We show that actinosomes are porous and capable of carrying out complex biochemical reactions like protein expression. Congrats Ketan on a beautiful work!

Selena Koene, a former MSc thesis student in our lab, is one of the latest UFW thesis award nominees! She did her master thesis in collaboration with Maria Forlenza (from Aquaculture and Fisheries, AFI), where she tested an exciting idea of using RNA-based coacervates (phase-separated particles) as vaccine delivery agents. Congrats Selena, well deserved!

As a part of the Horizon 2020 EU funded project PICKFOOD – Pickering emulsions for food applications – Xuefeng will study the physics behind the coalescence and stability of Pickering emulsions. Welcome Xuefeng!

Ketan’s work on making actinosomes received some nice news coverage, check it out! https://www.drugdiscoverynews.com/researchers-use-actin-to-develop-synthetic-condensates-15345

Two articles are posted on bioRxiv: one from Ketan on actinosomes: novel biocontainers to build synthetic cells and the other one from Larry on biosensors: using liquid crystal droplets to detect amphiphiles in vitro and in vivo. Well done guys!

Super-excited to start a new course in synthetic biology. Trying to give students a feel of what it will take to build a cell…

Very happy to see Chang Chen join our group as a PhD student. Welcome Chang and all the best with this new adventure!

We share the recent advancements on carrying out evolution in a lab-on-a-chip setting, now published in Trends in Biotechnology.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167779921001074

We share our views on how to effectively shape synthetic cells – using condensates as mediators and enhancers for the cytoskeleton functionality and their interactions with membranes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359029421000431

Our brief review about the wonderful world of LLPS in cell-sized confinements is now online!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359029421000030

We made an OLA flip book for the student thesis market at WUR! Was really fun and greatly appreciated. I think it’s a cool idea that can be used for so many time-lapse microscopy videos!

A wonderful student army (Mart, Anthony, Marleen, Kasper) that I was lucky to have during the postdoc! Well, only half of it is seen here as Anna, David (Sweden), Sree (Germany), Anson (Canada), and Frank were not at the party. Thank you so much for your contribution and wish you all the best!

What a wonderful and a memorable farewell you guys gave me before I am off to Wageningen! Thanks to Cees, my students, and all the present and past lab members for making this such a wonderful journey!