Publications de Sebastian Maerkl

Evolving Infectious Disease Dynamics Shape School-based Intervention Effectiveness

School-based interventions during epidemics are often controversial, as experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, where reducing transmission had to be weighed against the adverse effects on young children. However, it remains unclear how the broader epide ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2025

Continuous in situ synthesis of a complete set of tRNAs sustains steady-state translation in a recombinant cell-free system

Sebastian Maerkl

Construction of a self-regenerating biochemical system is critical for building a synthetic cell. An essential step in building a self-regenerative system is producing a complete set of tRNAs for translation, which remains a significant challenge. Here, we ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

Targeting protein-ligand neosurfaces with a generalizable deep learning tool

Luc Reymond, Sebastian Maerkl, Philippe Schwaller, Sandrine Madeleine Suzanne Georgeon, Anthony Marchand, Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Pablo Gainza Cirauqui, Leo Scheller, Stephen Michael Buckley, Arne Schneuing, Martin Pacesa

Molecular recognition events between proteins drive biological processes in living systems1. However, higher levels of mechanistic regulation have emerged, in which protein-protein interactions are conditioned to small molecules2, 3, 4-5. Despite recent ad ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2025

Long-Term Protein Synthesis with PURE in a Mesoscale Dialysis System

Sebastian Maerkl, Francesco Stellacci, Laura Sophie Grasemann

Cell-free systems are powerful tools in synthetic biology with versatile and wide-ranging applications. However, a significant bottleneck for these systems, particularly the PURE cell-free system, is their limited reaction lifespan and yield. Dialysis offe ...

2025

Nature-inspired recycling of a protein mixture into a green fluorescent protein-based hydrogel

Sebastian Maerkl, Francesco Stellacci

Protein-based materials are biocompatible and have a variety of remarkable properties; consequently, they are finding more and more applications. Nature recycles proteins in multiple ways, ranging from bio-degradation (a slow approach) to fast recycling of ...

2024

Regulatory Components for Bacterial Cell-Free Systems Engineering

Sebastian Maerkl

Cell-free systems are advancing synthetic biology through fast prototyping and modularity. Complex regulatory networks can now be implemented in cell-free systems enabling various applications, such as diagnostic tool development, gene circuit prototyping, ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2024

Towards Self-regeneration: Exploring the Limits of Protein Synthesis in the Protein Synthesis Using Recombinant Elements (PURE) Cell-free Transcription-Translation System

Sebastian Maerkl, Ragunathan Bava Ganesh

Self-regeneration is a key function of living systems that needs to be recapitulated in vitro to create a living synthetic cell. A major limiting factor for protein self-regeneration in the PURE cell-free transcription-translation system is its high protei ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2024

A comprehensive review of Microfluidic approaches in cell-free synthetic biology

Sebastian Maerkl

Cell-free synthetic biology has gained increasing popularity owing to its ability to elucidate biological functions in isolation from intricate cellular environments and the capacity to build increasingly complex biochemical systems in vitro. But cellfree ...

Frontiers Media SA2024

Clinical sensitivity and specificity of a high-throughput microfluidic nano-immunoassay combined with capillary blood microsampling for the identification of anti-SARS-CoV-2 Spike IgG serostatus

Grégoire Michielin, Sebastian Maerkl

ObjectivesWe evaluate the diagnostic performance of dried blood microsampling combined with a high-throughput microfluidic nano-immunoassay (NIA) for the identification of anti-SARS-CoV-2 Spike IgG seropositivity. MethodsWe conducted a serological study am ...

2023

A field-capable rapid plant DNA extraction protocol using microneedle patches for botanical surveying and monitoring

Sebastian Maerkl, Jonathan Selz, Nicolas Rémi Adam

PremiseA novel protocol for rapid plant DNA extraction using microneedles is proposed, which supports botanic surveys, taxonomy, and systematics. This protocol can be conducted in the field with limited laboratory skills and equipment. The protocol is vali ...

WILEY2023

C2CAplus: A One-Pot Isothermal Circle-to-Circle DNA Amplification System

Sebastian Maerkl, Laura Sophie Grasemann

Rolling circle amplification (RCA) is a widely used DNA amplification method that uses circular template DNA as input and produces multimeric, linear single- or double-stranded DNA. Circle-to-circle amplification (C2CA) has further expanded this method by ...

Amer Chemical Soc2023

Perfect adaptation achieved by transport limitations governs the inorganic phosphate response in S. cerevisiae

Sebastian Maerkl, Michael Andrew Crone, Hon Ming Andrew Yip, Evan James Olson, Shiyu Cheng

Cells cope with and adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions. Sophisticated regulatory networks allow cells to adjust to these fluctuating environments. One such archetypal system is the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Pho regulon. When external inorganic ...

National Academy of Sciences2023

On biochemical constructors and synthetic cells

Sebastian Maerkl

Is it possible to build life? More specifically, is it possible to create a living synthetic cell from inanimate building blocks? This question precipitated into one of the most significant grand challenges in biochemistry and synthetic biology, with sever ...

ROYAL SOC2023

Epidemiological, virological and serological investigation of a SARS-CoV-2 outbreak (Alpha variant) in a primary school: A prospective longitudinal study

Grégoire Michielin, Sebastian Maerkl

Objectives ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2022

p High-Throughput Single-Cell TCR-pMHC Dissociation Rate Measurements Performed by an Autonomous Microfluidic Cellular Processing Unit

Sebastian Maerkl, Fabien Louis Claude Robert Jammes, George Coukos

We developed an integrated microfluidic cellular processing unit (mCPU) capable of autonomously isolating single cells and performing measurements and on-the-fly analysis of cell- surface dissociation rates, followed by recovery of selected cells. We perfo ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2022

An automated do-it-yourself system for dynamic stem cell and organoid culture in standard multi-well plates

Matthias Lütolf, Sebastian Maerkl, Zoe Newell Swank, Stefano Davide Vianello, Julia Tischler, Hao-An Hsiung

We present a low-cost, do-it-yourself system for complexmammalian cell culture under dynamically changing medium formulations by integrating conventional multi-well tissue culture plates with simple microfluidic control and system automation. We demonstrat ...

2022

Improved Cell-Free Transcription-Translation Reactions in Microfluidic Chemostats Augmented with Hydrogel Membranes for Continuous Small Molecule Dialysis

Sebastian Maerkl, Barbora Lavickova, Laura Sophie Grasemann

Increasing the protein production capacity of the PURE cell-free transcription-translation (TX-TL) system will be key to implementing complex synthetic biological circuits, and to establishing a fully self-regenerating system as a basis for the development ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2022

Biochemistry of Aminoacyl tRNA Synthetase and tRNAs and Their Engineering for Cell-Free and Synthetic Cell Applications

Sebastian Maerkl, Ragunathan Bava Ganesh

Cell-free biology is increasingly utilized for engineering biological systems, incorporating novel functionality, and circumventing many of the complications associated with cells. The central dogma describes the information flow in biology consisting of t ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

A SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) variant outbreak in a primary school in Geneva, Switzerland

Grégoire Michielin, Sebastian Maerkl, Idris Guessous

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2022

Direct encapsulation of biomolecules in semi-permeable microcapsules produced with double-emulsions

Grégoire Michielin, Sebastian Maerkl

Compartmentalization can serve different purposes such as the protection of biological active substances from the environment, or the creation of a unique combination of biomolecules for diagnostic, therapeutic, or other bioengineering applications. We pre ...

Nature Portfolio2022