Abstract
Liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) in biology is a recently appreciated means of intracellular compartmentalization. Because the mechanisms driving phase separations are grounded in physical interactions, they can be recreated within less complex systems consisting of only a few simple components, to serve as artificial microcompartments. Within these simple systems, the effect of compartmentalization and microenvironments upon biological reactions and processes can be studied. This review will explore several approaches to incorporating LLPS as artificial cytoplasms and in artificial cells, including both segregative and associative phase separation.
Highlights
Construction of artificial or synthetic cells can lead to advances in understanding cell biology and in other fields such as biotechnology, medicine or materials science where inspiration from biology can be applied in new ways [1,2,3,4,5]
As artificial cells are developed, it is important to bear in mind that the interior of living cells is not uniform, but rather contains many distinct regions and compartments with different composition and physical properties, which can be reflected within the cellular mimics [6]
While this is difficult with segregative phases, the high viscosity of the associative phases induces stretching along the length of the jet, leading to recoil and droplet separation that can be controlled through the flow rate of the two phases [116]
Summary
Construction of artificial or synthetic cells can lead to advances in understanding cell biology and in other fields such as biotechnology, medicine or materials science where inspiration from biology can be applied in new ways [1,2,3,4,5]. As artificial cells are developed, it is important to bear in mind that the interior of living cells is not uniform, but rather contains many distinct regions and compartments with different composition and physical properties, which can be reflected within the cellular mimics [6] These range from membrane-bound organelles such as the nucleus and mitochondria to membraneless organelles like the nucleolus. A new class of membraneless organelles has only recently been recognized to form by intracellular liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS) [19,20,21,22,23] These ‘liquid organelles’ include the cytoplasmic P granules (figure 1a) [24,27], as well as the nucleolus (figure 1b) [25,26] and nuclear Cajal bodies (figure 1c) [26,28] among others [20]. We will consider four classes of model system that each contain coexisting aqueous phases of distinct composition: (i) ‘bulk’ systems in which droplets of one aqueous phase are dispersed within another continuous aqueous phase (figure 2a); (ii) phase-separated water-in-oil (w/o) emulsion droplets stabilized by surfactants (figure 2b); (iii) lipid vesicle-encapsulated biphasic systems (figure 2c); (iv) Pickering-style emulsions, where lipid vesicles are used to stabilize droplet interfaces against coalescence (figure 2d)
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