On behalf of Mustafa Khammash, we kindly invite you to the Special Seminar:

Wilfried Weber

INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Saarbrücken, Germany

Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

Programming Materials with Synthetic Biology

Our research is positioned at the intersection of synthetic biology and materials sciences. We apply concepts and molecular tools from synthetic biology to program the properties and functions of biohybrid materials. We will present three lines of our research. First, we will present extracellular optogenetic strategies to dynamically modulate biological and mechanical properties of the extracellular matrix. Here, we demonstrate that the functional coupling of molecular photoreceptors to chemical polymers, biomolecules, and surfaces allows the control of key features of matrix-cell interactions. Second, we will describe the development of synthetic biology-inspired information-processing biohybrid materials. By functionally coupling biological light- and chemically responsive switches to polymer materials, and interconnecting individual material modules via diffusible signals, we implement biomolecular circuits. The circuits act as signal amplifier via feed-forward and feedback loops, as counter for input light pulses or as binary decoder and encoder. Finally, we will develop the concept of changing the material properties of transcription factor condensates in cells. We observed that liquid transcription factor droplets correlated with a several-fold increased activation strength in mammalian cells and mice. In contrast, upon conversion of transcription factors into a gel-like material, strong inhibition of target promoters was observed. This approach allowed the conversion of otherwise activating transcription factors into dominant negative inhibitors and was shown compatible with synthetic and natural transcription factors as well as with exogenous or endogenous target genes.