Job Boekhoven

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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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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.com/doi/10.1002/ad…

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:
…mistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

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/ja…

We found a peptide that forms amyloid fibers—the types associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Although the exact pathway is unknown, a complication is that these fibers grow autocatalytically—once a fiber is formed, it helps form new ones.
tinyurl.com/54x79mxz