SKM 2023 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 12: Biopolymers and Biomaterials (joint session BP/CPP)
BP 12.8: Talk
Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 11:45–12:00, TOE 317
Quantifying optomechanical properties of phase separated protein condensates — •Timon Beck1, Lize van der Linden2, Raimund Schlüßler2, Kyoohyun Kim1, Simon Alberti2, and Jochen Guck1 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen, Germany — 2Biotec TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany
The organization of intracellular material is a complex task and cells have different strategies for compartmentalization. One way is the formation of membraneless organelles that are involved, for example, in metabolic control and DNA repair. The underlying process of phase separation and percolation is tightly controlled by many parameters as temperature, ion and protein concentration, as well as crowding conditions. Changes in these parameters have an impact on the intermolecular interactions and accordingly tune optical and viscoelastic characteristics of the condensates. Despite the dynamic development of the research field in the last years, there is a lack of tools to quantitatively measure such physical properties. A combination of Brillouin microscopy with quantitative phase imaging, providing information about refractive index and density, gives access to a set of optical and mechanical quantities and in particular the longitudinal modulus. By varying temperature and ion conditions, we were able to tune intermolecular interactions within phase separated protein droplets and found that the introduced variations are reflected in the optomechanical properties of the condensates.