Registration of interest and abstract submission for both oral and poster contributions is now open, with deadline on 23rd of January, 2026.

We will have an amazing and international line-up of invited speakers. The event will discuss the state-of-art and challenges on membrane biophysics and engineering for biology, biotechnology, and synthetic cells.

@ceb.cam.ac.uk @syncelleu.bsky.social

Stay tuned for more! Thanks to BBSRC, @royalsociety.org, @erc.europa.eu, NanoDTC, and Wolfson College Cambridge for funding!

Our receptors enabled us to emulate key features of signalling hubs in cell membranes, particularly their functional link to cation messengers. We think that this modular toolkit can help in building advanced synthetic cells, particularly bottom-up signalling pathways!

Finally we use our receptors to localise their peroxidase activity in lipid domains of synthetic cell membranes! We demonstrate this capability with both potassium and calcium as model signalling messengers.

We next apply receptor assembly to host G4-hemin DNAzymes and their catalytic activity on membrane surfaces. By monitoring the production of resorufin, we show that catalytic action depends on receptor relative abundance.

Exploiting the sequence and cation-dependence of G-quadruplex assembly, we show it is possible to finely tune the relative abundance of our receptors using a range of cations (including lithium!). This is a consequence of increased local concentrations when membrane-anchored.

Our receptors are membrane-bound tetramolecular DNA-based nanodevices, assembled via an intermolecular G-quadruplex

Beautiful work! Congratulations! 🧬