Bacterial cytoskeletal filaments: Towards a DNA segregation system for a synthetic cell

The past decades have seen the rapid development of many aspects of synthetic biology. For example, attempts to build synthetic cells under controlled conditions in the laboratory have led to significant achievements. Following a bottom-up approach, scientists aim at building a self-reproducing synthetic cell with a minimum number of biological...

Enabling yeast replication in extreme cold and heat

Open questions are whether life can be enabled in uninhabitable environments, and whether there is a limit to howmuch one can tune the speed of proliferation. Answering such questions has broad implications. It may reveal whether we can live in unforeseen habitats, whether we can slow down aging, and whether there are limits to lifespan. In this...

Characterization of torque-spectroscopy techniques for probing rotary nanomotors

This thesis describes developments in the characterization of torque-spectroscopy techniques, in particular magnetic and optical tweezers, with the goal of employing these techniques in studies on the bacterial flagellar motor of Escherichia coli.

Heat shock proteins studied by optical tweezers

Since the first protein structure reported, the understanding of how proteins fold so fast and efficiently into such peculiar shapes has quickly become one of the major problems of biology. Protein folding in the living cell features a new level of complexity due to highly crowded cellular environment. In order to overcome this problem, cells...