Professor Dora Tang

Talk: From molecules to life: building living systems from scratch

Compartmentalization is the primary determinant for containing and segregating molecular reactions that are critical for cellular function. However, the effect of physical compartmentalization on tuning biological enzymology is still poorly understood. To address this, we use bottom-up approaches to determine the effect of both membrane-bound and membrane-free compartmentalization on encapsulated enzyme reactions. A bottom-up approach provides the ability to generate physical models for biological compartmentalization using a small number of basic building blocks. This methodology has the added advantage that macroscopic properties of the compartment can be readily tuned and adapted on the molecular level.

In this talk I will discuss different strategies for characterizing enzyme kinetics within synthetic condensates and describe how these compartments can provide a physical feedback to regulate enzyme reactions that, then, tune the properties of the compartments. I will also discuss engineering strategies to increase robustness in synthetic cellular systems.

About this speaker

Dora Tang received her PhD from Imperial College London, UK, in 2010 in the area of membrane biophysics. After 1 year as an EPSRC knowledge transfer secondee at Diamond Light Source, Oxfordshire, UK she undertook a post-doc at the University of Bristol, UK, in the areas of origin of life (2011-2014) and then synthetic biology (2014-2016) with the BrisSynBio. In 2016 she started her independent lab at the MPI-CBG, Dresden as part of the MaxSynBio consortium and received a call for a Professorship in Synthetic Biology at the University of Saarland in 2022. Her research is fuelled by the question “what are the organisational principles of life?”.

To address this question,  she uses bottom-up synthetic biology approaches coupled to quantitative biophysical and chemical characterisation, with the goal of building and characterising minimal synthetic cellular systems from scratch. These minimal cells represent viable physical models for understanding the role of compartmentalisation for during the origin of life and in regulating biochemistry in modern biological cells. In the long term, she aims to take fundamental insights to engineering to realise a Life 2.0.