Materials Synthetic Biology Group

The first two successful PCRs as a fresh postdoc in the Materials Synthetic Biology group, led by Prof. Wilfried Weber.

@matsynbio.bsky.social
@leibnizinm.bsky.social

Not a bad start to this exciting opportunity 🧬 🧫.

Stay tuned for more!

Join our team: PhD opportunity in living therapeutic materials

Our group is looking for an enthusiastic PhD to work on the development of safety-by-design strategies for living therapeutic materials.

Apply by July 31st, 2025 : leibniz-inm.softgarden.io/job/57247378...

@leibnizinm.bsky.social

MatSynBio members will also be joining! Very much looking forward to it!

Congrats to @wilfriedweber.bsky.social, Prof. Martin Ostermann & Dr. Martin Weber (@unistuttgart.bsky.social) for their VolkswagenStiftung project, ADMIRATION! They'll be creating biodegradable, bio-inspired building materials with fungi - www.f01.uni-stuttgart.de/fakultaet/ak...

30s of science for 30 years of Leibniz YouTube video by INM - Leibniz-Institut für Neue Materialien

The @leibniz-gemeinschaft.de turns 30 this year! To celebrate, we are challenging ourselves to explain our research in a series of 30s clips. Here's the research of our Bioprogrammable Materials group, explained by @shrikrishnans.bsky.social

youtube.com/shorts/P1CeT...

#science

Feel free to also follow the @loopoffun.bsky.social account to stay up to date with our LoopOfFun project!
loop-of-fun.eu

Metabolite-Responsive Control of Transcription by Phase Separation-Based Synthetic Organelles Living natural materials have remarkable sensing abilities that translate external cues into functional changes of the material. The reconstruction of such sensing materials in bottom-up synthetic biology provides the opportunity to develop synthetic materials with life-like sensing and adaptation ability. Key to such functions are material modules that translate specific input signals into a biomolecular response. Here, we engineer a synthetic organelle based on liquid–liquid phase separation that translates a metabolic signal into the regulation of gene transcription. To this aim, we engineer the pyruvate-dependent repressor PdhR to undergo liquid–liquid phase separation in vitro by fusion to intrinsically disordered regions. We demonstrate that the resulting coacervates bind DNA harboring PdhR-responsive operator sites in a pyruvate dose-dependent and reversible manner. We observed that the activity of transcription units on the DNA was strongly attenuated following recruitment to the coacervates. However, the addition of pyruvate resulted in a reversible and dose-dependent reconstitution of transcriptional activity. The coacervate-based synthetic organelles linking metabolic cues to transcriptional signals represent a materials approach to confer stimulus responsiveness to minimal bottom-up synthetic biological systems and open opportunities in materials for sensor applications.

As an introductory post, check out our latest paper in which we engineer a phase-separated synthetic organelle that translates metabolic signals into gene transcription regulation!

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Hi Bluesky! 👋

Here it is the Materials Synthetic Biology group at the
@leibnizinm.bsky.social. Looking forward to connecting with the Synthetic Biology and Engineered Living Materials community!