Past research

I carried out my postdoctoral research in the lab of Cees Dekker (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands). With the ambition of creating synthetic cells, we set our primary aim to create and manipulate biochemical containers that could potentially act as architectural scaffolds for artificial cells. I designed a microfluidic technique (Octanol-assisted Liposome Assembly, abbreviated as OLA) to efficiently produce cell-sized and cell membrane-mimicking liposomes. Using OLA, we worked our way towards realising a growth-division cycle of liposomes. We further turned our attention to biomolecular condensates, membraneless organelles crucial for the proper functioning of cells, and succeeded in making ‘condensate-in-liposome’ hybrid containers to obtain a higher level of complexity and biochemical regulation.

During my postdoc, we collaborated with Ulrich Keyser lab (Cambridge University, UK) to further develop the OLA technique as a high-throughput drug-screening platform, for example, to study the effect of peptide antibiotics on membranes. Our assay allows trapping of hundreds of vesicles for long-term experimentation, to quantitatively characterise membranolytic activities, measure permeability coefficients, etc.

During my PhD, we used the flow-free microchambers for developing on-chip assays. For example, we combined them with optical tweezers to develop drug-testing assays on Trypanosoma brucei, a unicellular parasite that causes fatal sleeping sickness in humans. We also teamed up with the lab of Erik van Nimwegen (University of Basel, Switzerland), where we developed an integrated experimental and computational setup to study gene expression at a single-cell level.

I was a part of a highly interdisciplinary collaboration with the lab of Urs Jenal (University of Basel, Switzerland). We combined molecular biology techniques and mutant studies with microfluidic assays to elucidate the poorly understood surface-sensing mechanism in bacteria. We showed that the flagellar motor acts as a mechanical sensor in Caulobacter crescentus and further identified the key proteins responsible for downstream signalling.

I got exposed to the exciting world of bottom-up biology during my PhD in the lab of Thomas Pfohl (University of Basel, Switzerland), where I explored the dynamics of biopolymer networks. I developed a versatile microfluidic system, termed ‘microchambers’, to achieve step-by-step reaction sequences in a diffusion-controlled manner. I used these microchambers to address important questions regarding the functionality of the actin cytoskeleton, a protein polymer system that helps the cells move and change their shape. I was able to bring to light several emergent properties exhibited by actin bundles and the underlying microstructure dynamics, such as stress built-up in networks, filament length-dependent percolation, etc.