Bioengineering Graduate Program - Guest Seminar - Biomimetic Self-assembly of Subcellular Structures

If there is a secret recipe that enables living cells to build themselves from individual molecules, it is likely the hierarchical self-organization. Here, we report recent progress in the synthetic self-assembly analogous to subcellular structures, including flattened sacs, crystalline membranes, reconfigurable coacervate droplets, semiflexible filaments, and asters. Simplicity is the key of these synthetic systems—they can reproduce the architecture and, sometimes, functions of seemly complicated biological systems with surprisingly minimal constitutes, underling the overwhelming importance of fundamental physicochemical mechanisms over specific molecular details. Beyond molecular self assembly on a microscale, we expect integration of the assembled structures to function in unison and synergy as the next step towards cell imitation.