Unlocking a new toolkit for mediating protein-based interactions between synthetic cells and real cells

细胞仿生学和自下而上合成生物学领域的一个主要瓶颈是用用户定义的蛋白质可逆地装饰合成细胞的底盘的能力。解开这一技术瓶颈将改变我们介导合成细胞之间以及合成细胞与真实的细胞之间跨扩展长度尺度（包括基于组织的材料）的相互作用的能力。该项目将导致新一代人工脂质的开发，这些脂质能够可逆地结合商业上可获得的组氨酸标签蛋白质的扩展库，从而彻底改变我们功能化细胞仿生系统的能力。我们将通过使用这种方法在单细胞水平上调节合成细胞和真实的细胞之间的通信来验证这种策略。此外，通过利用细胞外蛋白，如整合素和钙粘蛋白，我们将制造杂交组织，容纳活细胞和合成细胞。这种方法是高度灵活的，并且可以扩展以适应大多数商业上可用的标签。

A major bottleneck in the field of cellular bionics and bottom-up synthetic biology is the ability to reversibly decorate the chassis of synthetic cells with user defined proteins. Unlocking this technology bottleneck would transform our ability to mediate interactions between synthetic cells and between synthetic cells and real cells across extended length scales including tissues based materials. This project will lead to the development of a new generation of artificial lipids that are able to reversibly bind an extended library of commercially available his-tagged proteins thereby revolutionising our ability to functionalise cellular bionic systems. We will validate this strategy by using this approach to modulate communication between synthetic cells and real cells at the single cell level. In addition by making use of extracellular proteins, such as integrin and cadherin we will manufacture hybrid tissues that accommodate living and synthetic cells. This approach is highly flexible and can be extended to accommodate most commercially available tags.