The SCALE Science Lunch Seminar continues on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, at 12:30 h (s.t.) with a talk by Stefan Vogel Ph.D. (Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark).
From DNA-Programmed Biomembrane Fusion to Oligonucleotide Delivery
Membrane anchoring of biomolecules is a natural process and observed for proteins, RNA and carbohydrates but not described for DNA. However, the membrane surface of biological and artificial lipid bilayers can be engineered by lipidated nucleic acids (LiNAs), introducing programmable functionality to the surface of lipid membranes. LiNAs can be classified as SNARE mimics, whereas SNARE proteins control biomembrane fusion in eukaryotes, LiNAs provides some of the key functionality of SNAREs in a fully programmable fashion. In contrast to SNARE-dependent eukaryotic vesicle processing, LiNA exploits the encoding-potential of DNA hybridization for the fusion of liposomes or biological lipid nanoparticles such as extracellular vesicles (EVs).
The fusion platform is suitable for applications in the bottom-up construction and operation of lipid nanoreactors for DNA-encoded-libraries (DELs) and is applicable from nanoscale (< 100 nm) to cell sized lipid particles (> 10.000 nm). In the field of synthetic biology, fusion cascades with efficient content mixing to facilitate design and construction of multi-component artificial cellular systems would be very desirable. LiNAs are also useful for delivery applications such as biomimetic hybrid particles for delivery and formulation of therapeutic oligonucleotides prepared by fusion between extracellular vesicles (EVs) with synthetic cargo loaded vesicles (e.g., liposomes loaded with oligonucleotides or proteins) resulting in hybrid-EVs (EVLs).
The SCALE Science Lunch Seminar will take place in hybrid format. We warmly invite you to join us in person at the MPI for Biophysics, where a light lunch and coffee will be provided after the seminar. The talk will also be streamed live via Zoom. The zoom link will be sent by e-mail to the SCALE mailing list. To subscribe to the mailing list, please send an e-mail to scale-office@uni-frankfurt.de.
We look forward to welcoming you to the next SCALE Science Lunch Seminar.
