title: Engineering Synthetic Cell Division: Towards the Creation of Self-Replicating Cells from the Bottom up
creator: Dreher, Yannik Aaron
subject: ddc-620
subject: 620 Engineering and allied operations
description: Bottom-up synthetic biology has set itself the exciting and ambitious task to create cellular life from scratch. In particular, the successful mimicry of cell division, which is widely considered one of its fundamental features, represents a milestone towards this goal.   However, the complexity of cellular division machineries limits the progress of their reconstitution into synthetic cells, opening the way for novel and creative approaches for the bottom-up engineering of synthetic cell division. \\  In this thesis I engineer mechanisms which can be employed for the implementation and analysis of a synthetic self-replicating cell. In particular, I develop mechanisms for the division of lipid vesicles as synthetic cell compartments with full spatio-temporal control. I present a module which allows for the segregation of DNA droplets as information carriers within synthetic cell compartments. Furthermore, I developed a DNA origami-based genotype-phenotype system which holds important features of natural genotype-phenotpye maps, namely, variability and stability. Additionally, I developed an open-source software tool for 3D object reconstruction and analysis to study structural changes during division and phenotypic effects on vesicle morphology.\\  All in all, these contributions provide valuable strategies for the implementation and analysis of a synthetic self-replicating cell, bringing us closer to the ultimate goal of creating life from scratch.
date: 2023
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/33483/1/09052023_Dissertation_YannikDreher.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00033483
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-334837
identifier:   Dreher, Yannik Aaron  (2023) Engineering Synthetic Cell Division: Towards the Creation of Self-Replicating Cells from the Bottom up.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/33483/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng