Dr Yuval Elani leads the Soft Microsystems Group in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial. His group develop soft-matter microsystems and artificial cells for synthetic biology. The group’s systems are often functionalised with nanocomponents, both biomolecular in nature (e.g. enzymes, protein channels, functionalised DNA) and completely synthetic (e.g. gold and magnetic nanoparticles). The group probe their systems on the nano-level level e.g. using electrophysiology, microfluidics, and optofluidics. They also investigate how artificial cells can be interfaced with living biological systems – organelles, cells, and tissues – to yield hybrid cellular bionic systems that are composed of living and synthetic components
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