Cellular Compartmentalisation and Condensate Formation from Biology to Physical-Chemistry

By compartmentalising, multiple processes can simultaneously occur in the cell, such as energy production in mitochondria and lysosomal material breakdown. In the emerging area of condensates, biomolecules are not surrounded by a lipid bilayer and behave as membrane-less organelles that phase-separate into liquid compartments that concentrate in the cell. This may occur with proteins, lipids, small-molecule drugs, and nucleic acids. This research has implications in neurodegeneration, genetic disorders, and mitochondrial diseases to name a few. This project area is one of our institute’s core challenges which is inherently cross-disciplinary – pushing the understanding of cellular function based upon chemical and morphological organelle dynamics.