ZHMB Kolloquium: Snippets from ELiS: Phages and TEARS

Snippets from ELiS: Phages and TEARS

In my seminar I will focus on two main topics that reflect our interest at the Engaged Life Sciences lab to couple fundamental questions and foreseeable real-world applications, akin to what is often termed as the Pasteur's Quadrant. [1] We use RNA repetitive sequences to elicit phase separation in E. coli. We attempt to understand the interplay between repetitive sequences, their length and the rules governing such phase separation. On the other hand, we use such phase separating system as synthetic organelles to isolate specific proteins in the bacterial cytoplasm, for their efficient one step purification or to drive metabolic pathways. [2] We use cell free systems to synthesize full phages in order to understand the coupling between genotype and phenotype in absence of compartmentalization and use these phages to better understand the phage life cycle, by reconstructing it using liposome-based synthetic cells. Such systems could then be exploited
in the future for directed evolution.                                                                                                                                                    
                                                                           

^{[1] Guo H et al Spatial engineering of E. coli with addressable phase-separated RNAs. Cell. 2022 Sep 29;185(20):3823-3837.e23. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.09.016.
[2] Levrier A et al. PHEIGES: all-cell-free phage synthesis and selection from engineered genomes. Nat Commun. 2024 Mar 12;15(1):2223. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-46585-1}