Artificial Cytoskeleton Assembly for Synthetic Cell Motility.

Imitation of cellular processes in cell-like compartments is a current research focus in synthetic biology. Here, we introduce a method for assembling an artificial cytoskeleton in a synthetic cell model system based on a poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) composite material. Towards this end, we introduced a PNIPAM-based composite material inside water-in-oil droplets that have been stabilized with PNIPAM-functionalized and commercial fluorosurfactants. We investigated the temperature-mediated contraction/release behavior of the PNIPAM-based cytoskeleton. We further examined the reversibility of the PNIPAM transition in bulk and in droplets and could show that hydrogel induced deformation could be used to controllably manipulate droplet-based synthetic cell motility upon temperature changes. We envision that a combination of the presented artificial cytoskeleton with naturally occurring components might expand the bandwidth of the bottom-up synthetic biology. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.