Engineering Life

13 Mar 2023, 08:00 → 24 Mar 2023, 16:00 Europe/Berlin

MIAPbP

Life, as we know it today, is characterized by a set of biophysical properties that include the ability to grow, divide and replicate, and evolve in complexity via selection and distinction. From a chemical perspective, such processes are realized by chemical reactions and assembly processes that turnover reactants, and this turnover is driven by the supply of mass and energy. From a theoretical perspective, this supply maintains the system away from thermodynamic equilibrium leading to continuous fluxes of energy and mass, even in the stationary state of the system. To engineer living systems or specific life-like processes, unified approaches are necessary that incorporate concepts from biophysics, system chemistry, and theoretical physics.

 

This workshop aims to bring together scientists from these three fields to discuss the current challenges to engineering life-like processes. The workshop will provide a collaborative environment that includes plenary talks on the question “What is life?” and the related challenges to engineering it. Moreover, there will be sessions with interactive short talks and brainstorming sessions with plenty of time to freely gather and develop novel approaches to how to engineer life.

Monday 13 March

10:30 → 11:00 Goals of workshop

Speakers: Christoph Weber, Job Boekhoven, Kerstin Göpfrich

11:00 → 12:00 Creating links between physics and chemistry to reconstruct the Origins of Life

Speaker: Dieter Braun

12:00 → 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 → 14:00 Introduction: The idea of group discussions and perspective writing

14:00 → 15:00 Group discussion: What is the goal of engineering life?

collaborator meetings,
jointly writing a perspective article on “Challenges on Engineering Life”

15:00 → 15:30 Coffee Break

15:30 → 16:00 Selected short talk - "Coacervate protocells formed by native chemical ligation"

Speaker: Annemiek Slootbeek

16:00 → 16:30 Selected short talk - "Cycles of (de)hydration far away from equilibrium catalyses chemical processes"

Speaker: Ivar Haugerud

16:30 → 17:00 Selected short talk - "Chirality transfer from a 3D macro shape to the molecular level through asymmetric secondary flows"

Speaker: Alessandro Sorrenti

17:00 → 19:30 Social Event: Bavarian Brotzeit

Tuesday 14 March

10:00 → 11:00 From self-organization to self-division

Speaker: Petra Schwille

11:00 → 12:00 Group Discussion: Life is functional evolution. But how to define & measure function?

12:00 → 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 → 13:30 Selected short talk - "Ghost in the cell: artificial cells via enzyme-mediated polymer synthesis and self-assembly"

Speaker: Andrea Belluati

Belluati_Slides.pdf

13:30 → 14:00 Selected short talk - "Linking molecular-scale to mesoscale dynamics in biomolecular condensates"

Speaker: Nicola Galvanetto

14:00 → 14:30 Selected short talk - "Toward building an artificial nucleus"

Speaker: Eva Bertosin

14:30 → 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 → 16:00 Collective intelligence - from bugs to bots

Speaker: L Mahadevan

16:00 → 17:00 Group Discussion: Engineered biotectonics - from cells to ecosystems

Wednesday 15 March

10:00 → 11:00 Molecular information processing in chemical reaction networks

Speaker: Wilhelm Huck

11:00 → 12:00 Group Discussion

12:00 → 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 → 13:30 Selected short talk - "Systems chemistry of aminoacyl phosphates: Spontaneous and selective peptide oligomerisation in water driven by phase changes."

Speaker: Kun Dai

Dai_Abstract.pdf

13:30 → 14:00 Selected short talk - "Heat flows purify >50 building blocks of life and boost their reactivity"

Speaker: Thomas Matreux

14:00 → 14:30 Selected short talk - "Reciprocal Coupling in Chemically Fueled Assembly: A ReactionCycle Regulates Self-Assembly and Vice Versa"

Speaker: Brigitte Kriebisch

14:30 → 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 → 16:00 General Group discussion: Should synthetic cells have synthetic hardware?

16:00 → 18:00 General Group discussion: Joint perspective writing

Thursday 16 March

10:00 → 11:00 Physics of Active Emulsions

Speaker: Frank Jülicher

11:00 → 12:00 Group Discussion: How to use non-equilibrium physics to create life-like behaviors?

12:00 → 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 → 13:30 Selected short talk - "Ordered structures from liquid-liquid phase separation by supramolecular polymerizations"

Speaker: Hailin Fu

13:30 → 14:00 Selected short talk - "Lesion-Induced DNA Amplification as a Model System for Autonomous Nucleotide Self-Replication"

Speaker: Juli Gibbs

14:00 → 14:30 Selected short talk - "A DNA segregation module for synthetic cells"

Speaker: Mai Tran

14:30 → 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 → 16:00 An RNA world of possibilities: the satellite, the robot and the replicase

Speaker: Ebbe Sloth Andersen

16:00 → 17:00 Group Discussion: “How do we design RNA systems that sense, compute, and act? And how do we make them replicate, adapt, and evolve.”

Friday 17 March

08:00 → 17:00 Hike with short talks and lunch at mountain hut

Monday 20 March

10:00 → 11:00 Bridging the RNA and lipid worlds: unexpected roles for lipids in RNA regulation

Speaker: James Saenz

11:00 → 12:00 Group discussion: How do we program heritable organization into synthetic life?

12:00 → 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 → 13:30 Selected short talk - "Key features in the design and fabrication of living robots"

Speaker: Maria Guix

13:30 → 14:00 Information processing in simple organisms: A case study

Speaker: Karen Alim

14:00 → 14:30 Selected short talk - "Quasi-Laminar Active Nematic Flows Under Confinement"

Speaker: Olga Bantysh

14:30 → 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 → 16:00 Communicating Active Matter

Speaker: Erwin Frey

16:00 → 17:00 Group discussion: Can theory contribute to the field of soft robotics, and what is soft robotics anyway?

17:00 → 19:30 Social Event

Tuesday 21 March

10:00 → 11:00 Cell-free protein synthesis: the engine of synthetic cells?

Speaker: Nadanai Lauhakunakorn

Laohakunakorn_Slides.pdf

11:00 → 12:00 Group Discussion: How should we build and sustain self-regenerating systems?

12:00 → 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 → 13:30 Selected short talk - "Phase-separated compartments as biochemical reactors"

Speaker: Sudarshana Laha

13:30 → 14:00 Selected short talk - "DNA origami and DNA droplet components for synthetic cells"

Speaker: Shelley Wickham

14:00 → 14:30 Selected short talk - "Influence of the extracellular domain size on the dynamic behavior of membrane proteins"

Speaker: Cenk Gurdap

14:30 → 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 → 17:00 General Group discussion: Open questions on perspective writing

Wednesday 22 March

10:00 → 11:00 How dynamic molecular networks can accumulate life-like properties

Speaker: Sijbren Otto

11:00 → 12:00 Group discussion: How to tame chemistry?

12:00 → 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 → 13:30 Selected short talk - "Template-based information transfer in chemically fueled dynamic combinatorial libraries"

Speaker: Christine Kriebisch

13:30 → 14:00 Selected short talk - "Reaction-Directed Assembly: Controlling Changes of Membrane Topology by Reaction Cycles"

Speaker: Gregor Ibbeken

14:00 → 14:30 Selected short talk -“TBD”

Speaker: Alexander Bergmann

14:30 → 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 → 16:00 Spatial proximity effects for engineering life

Speaker: Ulrich Gerland

16:00 → 17:00 Group discussion: How can we exploit spatial arrangement for engineering life?

Thursday 23 March

10:00 → 11:00 A lesson from early cells

Speaker: Claudia Bonfio

11:00 → 12:00 Group Discussion: Compartmentalisation: natural vs. artificial building blocks

12:00 → 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 → 13:30 Selected short talk - "Exploring the role of class I myosins in plasma membrane organization using an in vitro reconstitution approach"

Speaker: Bhagyashri Mahajan

13:30 → 14:00 Selected short talk - "The dynamics of phase separation and wetting in cell-free expression system"

Speaker: Shuzo Kato

14:00 → 14:30 Selected short talk - "Bottom-up building a self-regenerating microfluidic biochemical constructor"

Speaker: Pao-Wan Lee

14:30 → 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 → 16:00 Life but not alive: bioengineering with synthetic cells

Speaker: Kate Adamala

16:00 → 17:00 Group discussion: How can we build an interoperable synthetic cell systems?

17:00 → 17:30 Closing remarks

Speakers: Christoph Weber, Job Boekhoven, Kerstin Göpfrich