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Friday, 21 April, 2023

HSFP grant to Dieter Braun

Together with two international partners, CeNS member Dieter Braun has received funding worth around a million euros from the Human Frontier Science Program.

 

Prof. Dr. Dieter Braun | © Christoph Hohmann

As head of the project “Autonomous evolution of synthetic cells under non-equilibrium conditions,” biophysicist Dieter Braun will investigate the evolution of cells in conjunction with Kerstin Göpfrich (Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg) and Tomoaki Matsuura (Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology). First, the researchers will seek to understand how protocells originated in the course of Earth’s history. Building on this, the team will then experimentally monitor for the first time how such synthetic protocells develop in a state of non-equilibrium. This Darwinian evolution will run without the intervention of the researchers.

The team is pursuing the idea that the complexity of molecular and cellular systems developed almost necessarily out of simpler systems. “In all these hierarchical steps, we’re trying to trigger evolutionary steps through physical processes,” says LMU biophysicist Dieter Braun. “The emergence of a cellular phenotype elevated the efficiency of Darwinian evolution to a new plane – but it remains uncertain how such cellular evolution could have developed by itself.”

In the experiment, the researchers want to observe the developing functionality of biomolecules in protocells. The mechanism as a whole encompasses the reproduction of genetic information, the concentration of biomolecules, and the formation of cell compartments, so-called vesicles. In a microfluidic flow system, the system of synthetic cells is brought into non-equilibrium conditions by means of heating and cooling or freezing and thawing. The goal is to understand how functional complexity incrementally emerges in these cells.

Prof. Dieter Braun has been Professor of Systems Biophysics at LMU since 2007. In 2018, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded him an Advanced Grant. Since 2018, he has also been spokesperson of the “Emergence of Life” Collaborative Research Centre supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Source: LMU