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6760 Forest Park Pkwy, St. Louis, MO 63105, USA
#WashUBMEPresenting on “A New Phase of Biological Controls- A design framework for programmable synthetic biomolecular condensates and the mechanisms of a functional liquid-liquid interface”
Yifan Dai, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, will speak on Thursday, February 23, 2023 at 10:00 am CST in Whitaker 218.
Abstract: A fundamental question in nature is how the cellular processes are organized with sequential and spatial precision in a dynamic and densely packed environment. Evidence is now mounting that biomolecular condensation, a demixing process mediated by phase separation coupled to percolation, dictates the organization principles of cellular biochemistry. From the perspective of synthetic biology, programmable condensation in living cells represents a new fundamental capability for biological design, going beyond the current engineering capability of lock-and-key interactions. In the first part of the talk, I will introduce a rational design strategy of synthetic intrinsically disordered proteins toward functional synthetic biomolecular condensates for cellular controls in bacteria and human cells. I will demonstrate the applications of synthetic condensates on four distinct cellular processes: cell division, transcription, translation, and modulation of protein circuits, providing a toolbox for orthogonal central dogma.
In the second part of the talk, I will dig into the physical chemistry principles of condensate microenvironments, by which condensates can encode unique electrochemical features at its liquid-liquid interface. I will introduce a theoretical framework we developed for condensate interface, which allows us to understand the density transition process of condensate formation from the perspective of electrochemistry. I will then discuss our experimental discoveries on the fundamental electrochemical properties of liquid-liquid interface and how these features can regulate cellular processes. These discoveries open new directions of condensate research and provide answers for many previously unexplained biological activities of biomolecular condensates.
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