Publications by Sebastian Maerkl

Related publications (67)

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

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

Integrating gene synthesis and microfluidic protein analysis for rapid protein engineering

Sebastian Maerkl, Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Ekaterina Emilova Petrova, Matthew Christopher Blackburn

The capability to rapidly design proteins with novel functions will have a significant impact on medicine, biotechnology and synthetic biology. Synthetic genes are becoming a commodity, but integrated approaches have yet to be developed that take full adva ...

Oxford Univ Press2016

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

Sebastian Maerkl, Grégoire Michielin, Fatemeh Arefi

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

Cell-free gene-regulatory network engineering with synthetic transcription factors

Sebastian Maerkl, Zoe Newell Swank, Nadanai Laohakunakorn

Gene-regulatory networks are ubiquitous in nature and critical for bottom-up engineering of synthetic networks. Transcriptional repression is a fundamental function that can be tuned at the level of DNA, protein, and cooperative protein-protein interaction ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

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

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

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

Integration of plasmonic trapping in a microfluidic environment

Olivier Martin, Sebastian Maerkl, Lina Huang

Near field generated by plasmonic structures has recently been proposed to trap small objects. We report the first integration of plasmonic trapping with microfluidics for lab-on-a-chip applications. A three-layer plasmo-microfluidic chip is used to demons ...

Optical Society of America2009

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

Francesco Stellacci, Sebastian Maerkl, Laura Sophie Grasemann, Laura Roset Julia

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

How single-cell immunology is benefiting from microfluidic technologies

Sebastian Maerkl, Fabien Louis Claude Robert Jammes

The immune system is a complex network of specialized cells that work in concert to protect against invading pathogens and tissue damage. Imbalances in this network often result in excessive or absent immune responses leading to allergies, autoimmune disea ...

2020

Next generation microfluidic platforms for high-throughput protein biochemistry

Sebastian Maerkl

DNA technologies such as cloning, DNA microarrays, and next generation sequencing have transformed the life sciences. Protein technologies on the other hand have not seen such explosive progress. This is mainly due to the inherent difficulty of working wit ...

Elsevier2011

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

Cascaded amplifying circuits enable ultrasensitive cellular sensors for toxic metals

Sebastian Maerkl, Francesca Volpetti, Ekaterina Emilova Petrova

Cell-based biosensors have great potential to detect various toxic and pathogenic contaminants in aqueous environments. However, frequently they cannot meet practical requirements due to insufficient sensing performance. To address this issue, we investiga ...

2019

Evolving Infectious Disease Dynamics Shape School-based Intervention Effectiveness

Sebastian Maerkl, Grégoire Michielin

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

Microfluidic systems for cancer diagnostics

Sebastian Maerkl

Although not employed in the clinic as of yet, microfluidic systems are likely to become a key technology for cancer diagnostics and prognosis. Microfluidic devices have been developed for the analysis of various biomarkers including circulating tumor cell ...

2020

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

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

Sebastian Maerkl, Amogh Kumar Baranwal

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

Mapping the fine structure of a eukaryotic promoter input-output function

Sebastian Maerkl, Nicolas Dénervaud, Arun Stephen Rajkumar

The precise tuning of gene expression levels is essential for the optimal performance of transcriptional regulatory networks. We created 209 variants of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae PHO5 promoter to quantify how different binding sites for the transcriptio ...

Nature Publishing Group2013

Experimental strategies for studying transcription factor-DNA binding specificities

Sebastian Maerkl

Specific binding of transcription factors (TFs) determines in a large part the connectivity of gene regulatory networks as well as the quantitative level of gene expression. A multiplicity of both experimental and computational methods is currently used to ...

2010

Implementation of cell-free biological networks at steady state

Sebastian Maerkl, Henrike Marie Niederholtmeyer, Viktoria Stepanova

Living cells maintain a steady state of biochemical reaction rates by exchanging energy and matter with the environment. These exchanges usually do not occur in in vitro systems, which consequently go to chemical equilibrium. This in turn has severely cons ...

National Academy of Sciences2013

A chemostat array enables the spatio-temporal analysis of the yeast proteome

Michaël Unser, Sebastian Maerkl, Felix Naef, Ricard Delgado Gonzalo, Arun Stephen Rajkumar, Nicolas Dénervaud, Johannes Becker

Observing cellular responses to perturbations is central to generating and testing hypotheses in biology. We developed a massively parallel microchemostat array capable of growing and observing 1,152 yeast-GFP strains on the single-cell level with 20 min t ...

National Academy of Sciences2013