渗透压促使原细胞形成膜腔室结构

One of the goals of bottom-up synthetic biology is to establish membrane compartmentalization to increase the complexity of artificial cells. Artificial cells containing multiple compartments, such as liposomes containing liposomes, polymers containing polymers, and liposomes containing coacervates, have been reported. Coacervates are widely used as artificial cells due to their molecularly crowded environment that resembles the cytoplasmic matrix of living cells, however, it remains challenging to construct a membrane chamber structure in coacervates. Therefore, in this study, a bacteria-derived procell was constructed based on the capture and in-situ treatment of E. coli colonies by coacervates, and the bacteria-derived procells were able to undergo complex processing, such as inheriting sufficient bacterial gene expression mechanisms to achieve in vitro transcription and translation. On this basis, osmotic pressure was used to induce the formation of membrane chamber structure in primary cells, which improved the level of internal structure and organization of artificial cells.