Designing Motile and Chemotactic Protocells to Investigate and Exploit Cellular Collective Behaviours

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Our cells are the most elaborated biological machine. They are continuously releasing and up taking billions of molecules in the environment, and they use this communication system to process information and to act accordingly. However, manipulating and programming cells and understanding their intrinsic complexity is quite challenging as cell are often difficult to decode and manipulate. My research involves the creation of artificial cell-like systems from scratch by using synthetic or hybrid molecular building blocks, which are fully controllable by design and mimic the fundamental structure or mechanisms of natural cells. Among all the cellular processes and mechanisms, realising motile and life-like systems, controlling their motion and understating how they self-organise and self-assemble in interacting communities is one of the most fascinating challenges in synthetic biology.My research aims to generate artificial and motile protocells capable of converting chemical energy into mechanical motion, simulating the biological locomotion - 'chemotaxis'. Chemical gradients will act as a source of information that is then recognised and decoded into analyte-trigged motion. In cellular biology, motility and communication are two intimately connected phenomena. The motile protocells will exhibit emergent properties and complex collective behaviours based on cooperative interactions in response to chemical signals. The results will provide fundamental insight into the process of autonomous motion and chemotaxis at the nano/microscale to translate the motile protocells capabilities in biotechnological and biomedical applications.