Dr Yuval Elani - UKRI Future Leaders Fellow; Senior Lecturer, Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London.

The 21st century will be defined by biotechnology. Researchers worldwide are increasingly harnessing the power of cell biology to produce new chemicals sustainably, clean up the environment, detect pollutants, and act and novel therapeutics.

However, one of the major impediments we are facing relates to the fact that cells – the building blocks of biology – are living systems. The fact that they are living, responding, evolving, and their incredible molecular complexity means certain limitations are inherent. They are difficult (if not impossible) to controllably programme and engineer. We are also limited by the fact they must be kept “alive”, meaning that they cannot be interfaced with components that aren’t biological in nature (e.g., electronics).

In this talk, Dr Yuval Elani will discuss the efforts to circumvent these challenges by developing a series of technologies to make “synthetic cells” in the lab. These are non-living analogues of real biological cells, constructed from the bottom-up using both synthetic and biological components. They can be engineered to possess “behaviours” that are the hallmarks of life (motility, energy generation, communication, bioproduction, sense/response, evolution etc.), which are exploit in order to use them as molecular robotic systems for a range of applications in industrial and clinical biotechnology.