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Camila Betterelli Giuliano & the origins of life

Camila Betterelli Giuliano & the origins of life

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My microfluidic career – Origins of life

What can you achieve with microfluidics? What are the practical applications of microfluidics to a field of research, and how could microfluidics help your research career?


We asked our research team for you. My Microfluidic Careers pages give you a realistic, no-frills idea of the wide variety of projects that can benefit from microfluidics.

Researcher Camila Betterelli Giuliano

Camila Betterelli Giuliano is working on the ProtoMet project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 MSCA-ITN under grant agreement No 813873.

What is the most interesting thing about your project?

My project is about shining a light on the origins of life, which I find pretty cool!
 
The idea is to try to recreate chemical reactions that could have been plausible on Earth before life emerged and hopefully better understand how these processes eventually became what we know as life today. We are working on several fronts as a European H2020 Consortium under the Marie-Curie Actions, and right now, I’m working on assembling protocells with microfluidics.
 
 
Basically, I’m trying to recreate lipid vesicles, using microfluidics to encapsulate chemical reactions that could have happened in early Earth. Then, by tightly controlling these reactions, we can start to understand what factors influence them and how being in a confined environment (the lipid vesicle, representing an early cell membrane) could confer advantages over staying free in solution.

“I’m trying to recreate lipid vesicles, using microfluidics to encapsulate chemical reactions that could have happened in early Earth.”

How did you transition from your previous research field to microfluidics?

Camila-Betterelli-Giuliano-on-the-lab
I have a somewhat hybrid background. I’m a biotech engineer, but for most of my career, I worked with business and innovation. I decided that I wanted to keep working with business and innovation but be closer to science, so I decided to do an industrial PhD.
 
 
The opportunity to work with microfluidics came when I found the PhD position at Elvesys. This position gave me the opportunity to do research inside a startup, completely in line with my goal of working between business and science. Microfluidics aligns really well with my previous background as a biotech engineer, allowing me to exercise my engineering capabilities and apply them to chemistry and biology, so I think it was spot-on!

Which task seems impossible without microfluidics?

Most protocols for making lipid vesicles in bulk result in a final product with lipid vesicles of several different sizes, which is not great in terms of experimental reproducibility.
 
There are ways of homogenizing them, but that adds a step to the production. Also, if you want to make lipid vesicles inside lipid vesicles (called multivesicular vesicles or vesosomes), to mimic eukaryotic cells, it is very complicated to control how many vesicles are encapsulated.

Microfluidics solves all these problems. It is possible to control the size of the lipid vesicles during production in a very reliable and reproducible way, and you can control what you put inside them much more efficiently than with other methods.

How does this project push back the current state of the art?

Most of the reactions inside lipid vesicles, especially when discussing vesicles inside vesicles, are usually model reactions, only to prove that it is possible to control the chemical reactions inside these confined/hierarchical structures. Still, they don’t provide any insight into biochemical or metabolic pathways.
 
 
Our goal is to use these multivesicular vesicles as tools to illuminate the origins of life. We want to use more chemically relevant reactions and provide answers to research questions that go beyond “yes, we can use them as tools.”

“Our goal is to use these multivesicular vesicles as tools to shine a light into the origins of life.”

Do you already know what challenges in research you want to tackle next?

origins-of-life-Camila-Betterelli-Giuliano

The next step in my project is to think more about the environment surrounding these early Earth chemical reactions and compartments. 

 

My goal is to design a microfluidics platform to closely control pH, an important parameter for prebiotic Earth.

Curious about the Protomet project and Camila’s work? She went into its details in her webinar The origins of life meet microfluidics.

Check out the review written by Camila about droplet encapsulation!

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