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...

Response of DNA molecules to external fields: Electric and hydrodynamic

Electroporation of biomimetic vesicles

Electroporation is a popular technique to permeabilize the membrane for different purposes such as medical treatments, food processing and biomass processing. In this thesis, we use the bottom-up approach to unravel the role of specific cellular components in the electroporation of cellular membranes. We have studied the role of the gel-phase...