Research

Overview

We are an interdisciplinary working group made up of many curious scientists with a background in physics, chemistry or biology. We are interested in what the simplest possible form of life could be.

Biology defines that the smallest unit of life is the cell. But even the simplest cells on earth today are incredibly complex, making it practically impossible to understand their entirety. Similarly, we still have no real idea of how something like a cell could ever have formed. For this reason, we are trying to recreate essential processes of life from simple biological building blocks in order to get an idea of the physical and chemical conditions necessary for a chemical system to become a biological system.

To do this, we use the synthetic biology approach, which breaks down cellular systems into individual functional modules that can be studied independently of each other. Of particular interest to us is the function of cell division.

We are currently trying to build a molecular system that is as simple as possible and capable of autonomously dividing so-called membrane vesicles, the simplest models of cell envelopes, into two daughter cells. We are using some very interesting protein systems from E. coli bacteria for this purpose.