Abstract:

Compared to physics and chemistry, biology has always been lacking something like a simplified model system such as the hydrogen atom that would allow to formulate and scrutinize first principles and laws required for a fundamental understanding of the phenomenon of life. The reason is that biology’s study object is a moving target, as life ever since its origin on earth several billions of years ago has been complexifying through evolution, and although there is the conceptual agreement that the cell should be considered the basic unit of life, nothing is “basic” about this unit, the smallest representations of which still are incomprehensively complicated chemical reaction systems with more than thousands of genes alone. Our hypothesis is that if one ever wants to have in hands and under the microscope a truly minimal living system, one will have to build it from scratch. In contrast to origin-of-life research, however, we do not focus too strongly on the actual molecules nor aim to reproduce the plausible series of events that presumably led to the life we find on earth today. Instead, we understand life as a organizational form of matter that is primarily distinguished by a set of key functions, which can however be abstracted from their specific representatives in various organisms. In the past years, it has been our ambition to identify such a set of key functions for one of life’s most central features, self-division. Our experimental work focuses on the reconstitution of a dramatically reduced number of elements of the bacterial cell division system, which however appear to emerge basic features of division in protocell compartments. From our work so far that I will present in my talk, we feel encouraged to believe that the complex cellular division machineries may indeed be deduced to a very limited set of general functional elements, and that some of these rudimentary functions may even still be partly conserved in “modern”, highly specialized, proteins.​

Biography:

Petra Schwille (born 25 January 1968 in Sindelfingen) is a German professor and a researcher in the area of biophysics. Since 2011, she has been a director of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany as well as an Honorary Professor in physics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich since 2012. She is known for her ground-laying work in the field of fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, and numerous contributions on model membranes. Her current research focuses around bottom-up approaches to building an artificial cell within a broader area of synthetic biology. Schwille developed the "two-photon cross-correlation spectroscopy" method with which fundamental cellular processes can be explored.

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