Light-powered reactivation of flagella: towards building an artificial cell

Artificial systems capable of self-sustained movement with self-sufficient energy are of high interest with respect to the development of many challenging applications including medical treatments but also technical applications. The bottom-up assembly of such systems in the context of synthetic biology is still a challenging task. In this work, we demonstrate the biocompatibility and efficiency of an artificial light-driven energy module and a motility functional unit by integrating light-switchable photosynthetic vesicles with demembranated flagella that provide ATP for dynein molecular motors upon illumination. The flagellar propulsion is coupled to the beating frequency and dynamic ATP synthesis in response to illumination allows us to control beating frequency of flagella in a light-dependent manner. In addition, we verified the functionality of light-powered synthetic vesicles in in vitro motility assays by encapsulating microtubules assembled with force-generating kinesin-1 motors and the energy module to investigate the dynamics of a contractile filamentous network in cell-like compartments by optical stimulation. Integration of this photosynthetic system with various biological building blocks such as cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors may contribute to the bottom-up synthesis of artificial cells that are able to undergo motor-driven morphological deformations and exhibit directional motion in a light-controllable fashion. Graphical TOC Entry O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=82 SRC="FIGDIR/small/212191v3_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (20K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@79347aorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@164463dorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@3f8b01org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1bef3e8_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG