Artificial Plant Cells and Beyond

Synthetic plant biologists combine engineering with biology to build, modify and increase the fundamental understanding of plant machineries.

The entire body of plants are highly complex, but by breaking it down into smaller elements, and understanding these, new artificial modules can be attained which possess predictable properties or functions.

In the present project, the aim is to build artificial plant cells using a synthetic bottom-up approach, starting at the molecular level, with the goal to gain a deeper understanding of the molecular architecture as well as the interaction between different components on a very basic level. In this way we want to strip away the inherent plant cell-level complexity.

We are in particular interested in understanding and controlling the permeability properties of artificial boundaries (cell wall and plasma membranes).

Bottom-up fabrication approaches to retrieve artificial plant cells have not been studied extensively in the past, which has primarily to do with the difficulties of assembling plasma membrane mimics with cell wall mimics.

However, in a recent study published in Nature Communications, we showed how to overcome these fundamental difficulties and in the present project we aim at further pushing the research field forward on bottom-up assembled artificial plant cells.