Topics
2024.04.24
A group of researchers have expanded conventional knowledge on a critical enzyme that controls cell
Researcher
Hideaki T. Matsubayashi
Assistant ProfessorLife and Environments
- Mentor Information
- Associate Professor
- Shin-ichiro M. Nomura (Graduate School of Engineering)
| Research Fields | Synthetic Biology, Cell Biology, Biophysics |
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| Research Subjects |
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| Academic Society Membership | Japan Biophysical Society |
| Research Outline | |
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Living organisms show a variety of dynamic behaviors such as deformation, motility, and engulfment. Understanding the mechanism of these cellular dynamics would deepen our knowledge of biological systems and provide the opportunities to create molecular robots that autonomously operate active tasks. In this perspective, our research aims to reconstruct the cellular dynamics with purified molecules in a form of the artificial cell. Artificial cells are cell-sized bioreactors that mimic a certain cellular function. Although we can design the reactors with defined molecules, it has been still challenging to recapitulate cellular morphological dynamics since most of the artificial cell models are closed and homogeneous systems encapsulated by lipid membrane barrier and lack methods to manipulate inside reactions across the barrier. To overcome this problem, we have developed optogenetic techniques to achieve reversible and asymmetric reactions, which are prerequisite features of cellular dynamics, inside artificial cells. Reconstruction of cell motility would lead to a molecular robot that surveys around inside the human body and fight against disease conditions like an immune cell. In addition, the simplicity of the artificial cell model would be advantageous when we study minimal factors to functionalize cytoskeletal genes. Therefore, we anticipate our bottom-up approach could also provide experimental insights into the evolutional history of cellular dynamics.
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