Synthetic cells: building a new biology – with Dr Yuval Elani
Building a new biology: tools and technologies to engineer synthetic cells for biotechnology.
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 discussed 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.
Dr Yuval Elani is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. He co-directs the membrane biophysics platform and is founder and Co-Director of the fabriCELL centre for synthetic cell research.
Yuval studied Natural Sciences as an undergraduate (Cambridge, 2009) followed by a PhD in the Institute of Chemical Biology (Chemistry, Imperial College, 2015). After his PhD he held a series of fellowships working on various topics in biochemical engineering. He leads a diverse group of c. 25 researchers working on frontier research in applied biotechnology, including soft matter.
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