January 2024. Baptiste’s paper 'Collective chemomechanical oscillations in active hydrogels' has been published in PNAS.
April 2022. Our paper 'Crosslinking and depletion determine spatial instabilities in cytoskeletal active matter' has been published in Soft Matter.
February 2022. Our paper 'Long-Lasting and Responsive DNA/Enzyme-Based Programs in Serum-Supplemented Extracellular Media' has been published in ACS Synthetic Biology.
January 2022. Our paper 'Front speed and pattern selection of a propagating chemical front in an active fluid' has been published in Physical Review E.
December 2021. Our paper 'Programmed mechano-chemical coupling in reaction-diffusion active matter' has been published in Science Advances.
November 2021. Our paper 'DNA-Controlled Spatiotemporal Patterning of a Cytoskeletal Active Gel' has been published in JACS.
April 2021. Our book chapter 'Learning from Embryo Development to Engineer Self-organizing Materials' has been published in:
December 2020. Our paper 'Spatiotemporal Patterning of Living Cells with Extracellular DNA Programs' has been published in ACS Nano.
December 2020. Our book chapter 'Programming Spatio-temporal Patterns with DNA-based Circuits' has been published in:
October 2019. Our paper 'DNA-based long-lived reaction-diffusion patterning in a host hydrogel ' has been published in Soft Matter.
October 2019. Our paper 'Tunable corrugated patterns in an active gel sheet' has been published in PNAS. A great collaboration between experimentalists and theorists.
October 2019. DNA Nanotech workshop in Paris, Sorbonne Université, with short talks by members of Anthony Génot, Damien Baigl, Yannick Rondelez and our group. Plenary talks by Adrew Turberfield, Masahiro Takinoue and Ryuji Kawano.
May 2019. Our paper 'rEXPAR: an isothermal amplification scheme that is robust to autocatalytic parasites' has been published in ACS Biochemistry.
April 2018. Our paper 'Quantitative characterization of translational riboregulators using an in vitro transcription-translation system' has been published in ACS Synthetic Biology.
May 2017. Our paper 'Synthesis and materialization of a reaction–diffusion French flag pattern' has been published in Nature Chemistry.
Jan. 2017. A great collaboration with our colleagues from LIMMS, Tokyo/ESPCI, Paris: our paper 'Microscopic agents programmed by DNA circuits' has been published in Nature Nanotechnology.
Feb 2015. Our work 'Synthesis of programmable reaction-diffusion fronts using DNA catalyzers' has been published in Phys. Rev. Lett., with a viewpoint of I. R. Epstein. It has also been highlighted in Nature Nanotech and Physics and Chemistry world.
Oct 2013. We were lucky enough to have our recent work 'Spatial waves in synthetic biochemical networks' making the cover of JACS (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2013, 135 (39), pp 14461-14461).
A Synthetic Tom and Jerry to Power Molecular Machines
Deirdre Lockwood, Ph.D.
Andre Estevez-Torres, Yannick Rondelez, and colleagues have synthesized a chemical system that reproduces traveling waves observed in predator-prey interactions (DOI: 10.1021/ja403584p).
It is a dance we have all seen first-hand or at least in cartoons: cat chases mouse; mouse runs away. But from a physical perspective, interactions between predator and prey generate spatial patterns such as oscillations, waves, and spirals. The patterns are observed in populations of bacteria, plants, and marine phytoplankton. Researchers want to reproduce such biological patterns using synthetic chemical reactions so that they can incorporate them into molecular machines.
Now the team has synthetically generated for the first time a traveling wave based upon a predator-prey-like interaction by mixing small DNA fragments with enzymes. They determine the wave velocity and propose a reaction-diffusion model to explain the observations. As the oligonucleotide components of the system can be tuned to control its physical performance, the research could help build self-organizing molecular machines.
