Prof. Dr. Petra Schwille

From Single molecules to artificial cells
Dept. Cellular and Molecular Biophysics // Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry // Martinsried, Germany

Invited Talk II // Friday, October 30 // 9 am – 9.30 am (CET)

Applications of methods with single molecule sensitivity in living cells are extremely attractive, but often doomed to be unsatisfactory, because of the enormous complexity of relevant molecules and parameters. In order to arrive at better defined systems that allow high precision measurements with good reproducibility, biological phenonema are often reconstituted in cell-free systems, retaining only a sizeable number of variables. Our intention is to explore whether fundamental features of living organisms, such as cell division ad replication, can in principle be reconstituted from the bottom-up. The future vision shared by many synthetic biologists and biophysicists is to construct artificial cell-like entities, in which all components and processes are well defined and controllable, to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions for a chemical system to become biology.

Further Talks