Germán Rivas' group at CIB-Margarita Salas

RESEARCH

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Our research program fits within one of the grand challenges of synthetic biology: integrating individual molecular systems into functional modules towards building a synthetic cell from the bottom-up. The achievement of this goal requires, among other things, a profound mechanistic understanding of how the elements of essential molecular machines are organized, in time and space, and coordinated one to another, as a network of multiple interactions to function in the crowded and phase-separated cell interior.

 

We have selected the bacterial division machinery – the divisome – as the system to address these fundamental questions. Cytokinesis in bacteria is known in sufficient detail to provide a comprehensive list of its molecular effectors and their biochemical properties; therefore, it seems reasonable to expect that the application of bottom-up synthetic strategy to construct minimal divisomes in the test tube is feasible and will yield functional assemblies. This synthetic approach will help us support conclusions already derived from cellular and molecular analysis and, therefore, complete our understanding of how the bacterial division works.

 

Keywords: cellular biochemistry, molecular biophysics, bottom-up synthetic biology, protein science, molecular interactions, macromolecular crowding, macromolecular phase separation, biomolecular condensates, biological self-organization, cell division, bacteria