Synthetic Cell Aspirations: A Toolbox for Building a Membrane Container from the Bottom Up

Everything that we consider alive, be it plants, dogs, bacteria or humans, is composed of the same microscopic building blocks: cells. While cells between and even within these organisms can look and behave very differently, they all share the same key functionalities: they can grow, they can divide to proliferate, they can eat and metabolise to...

DisGUVery: A Versatile Open-Source Software for High-Throughput Image Analysis of Giant Unilamellar Vesicles

Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) are cell-sized aqueous compartments enclosed by a phospholipid bilayer. Due to their cell-mimicking properties, GUVs have become a widespread experimental tool in synthetic biology to study membrane properties and cellular processes. In stark contrast to the experimental progress, quantitative analysis of GUV...