Dr Salvador Tomas has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant to study and develop lipid vesicle-based, stimuli-responsive nanoreactors
Lipid vesicles resemble empty cells, a starting point where to build up programmable cell-like robots by the step-wise addition of molecular machinery. Developing such robots requires that we understand how chemical transformations are influenced by confinement within the boundaries of lipid vesicles. Dr Tomas research group has recently reported evidence that confinement promotes the very chemical reactions that enable the assembly of complex molecular machinery, essential to the function of natural and artificial cells. The aim of the project is to characterise rigorously this confinement effect and to exploit it to build cell-like devices programmed to perform chemical reactions in response to specific external stimuli.
More information about Dr Tomas’s research can be found on his ISMB profile.