Designer condensates

While the molecular details and regulatory principles that control biomolecular condensates are still incompletely understood, we and others have come up with initial guiding frameworks and principles that allow us to re-engineer cellular condensates or create synthetic ones from scratch. Our approach is based on an evolution-guided biosynthetic and -mimetic strategy, where we mine natural diversity to identify functional protein modules, allowing us to sculpt biological matter and design synthetic condensates of novel function. These condensates have applications ranging from drug screening and disease modeling to agriculture and catalysis.