Professor in supramolecular chemistry at the TU Munich figuring out the chemical principles of life.
Munich, Bavaria
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Job Boekhoven retweeted
Retweet appreciated!
PhD Position available in Peptide/Protein Design for Synthetic Nanomachines
We’re looking for a PhD student to join our lab at TUM to work at the interface of peptide chemistry and synthetic biology.
More info: boekhovenlab.com/openings/
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Job Boekhoven retweeted
🚨 New preprint!
From protein & RNA condensates to synthetic coacervates and DNA nanostars, vacuoles (dilute pockets inside droplets) show up everywhere🫧
We explain when and why they form. 🔬🧫 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2607.25743
w/@WebersGroup @BoekhovenLab @KGoepfrich
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Nature builds astonishing things by burning fuel — muscles contract, cells divide, materials heal — and never settles into equilibrium while doing it.
Our field has spent a decade building synthetic versions of this. New review 🧵advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley…
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Answer: kinetic asymmetry. Feedback between reaction and the structure it builds, biasing how fuel is consumed and turning simple dissipation into work.
That's what gives you directional motion, tunable lifetimes, self-healing, oscillations, bistability, spatiotemporal control
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We describe molecular-, assembly-, and material-scale systems with one shared state-network framework — hopefully a common language for designing the next generation of fuel-driven materials.
Read it here: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley…
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Job Boekhoven retweeted
Look at our new fuel-dependent droplets!
They emerge, grow, eat their neighbors, produce some offspring, and decay. All in 15 minutes!
Why?
Our goal is to build life.
Life from the bottom up, to better understand, what is life?
Paper here:
chemistry-europe.onlinelibra…
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Job Boekhoven retweeted
Excited to share our new PRL on excitable active droplets 🎉
We show that droplets maintained far from equilibrium behave as an excitable system and can undergo self-sustained cycles of formation and dissolution 🔥
Link: journals.aps.org/prl/abstrac…
w/ @WebersGroup @BoekhovenLab
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Life continuously consumes energy to keep structure and function.
But can similar behavior emerge in simpler chemical systems, w/o enzymes?
In our work in @J_A_C_S, we test enzyme-free phosphorylation cycle that dynamically regulates peptide assembly
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jac…
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5/ Our long-term goal is not simply to create dynamic assemblies.
We want to develop synthetic systems that can perform work
For molecular motors and pumps, energy consumption alone is not enough:
the reaction kinetics must be coupled to the supramolecular state of the system.
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Job Boekhoven retweeted
I’m happy to share Hector Soria Carrera and Leonie Kauling’s recent work in @Chem_CP!
A thread below.
cell.com/chem/fulltext/S2451…
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We found that fuel-driven droplets can prevent such autocatalytic fibers forming-when the peptide is turned over into phase-separate into droplets, we did not observe any plaques. This suggests that transiently capturing the peptides inside droplets prevents fiber formation.
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Our droplets are a model for the biomolecular condensates in our cells. Does turning over such condensates prevent aging of peptides in our cells too? It is too early to tell.
Besides, others have shown the opposite: droplets accelerate fibrillation.
tinyurl.com/2myycjfd
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