From Quantum Effects to Synthetic Cells

Two consortia of researchers centered at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft have each won multi-million-dollar Summit grants from the Dutch Research Council. Delft University of Technology biophysicists Cees Dekker and Gijsje Koenderink, physicist Lieven Vandersypen, and their co-applicants will share €174 million with three other consortia over 10 years.

The council announced the winners in May 2024. The grants aim to cement the Dutch groups’ positions internationally by supporting exploratory research with a decade of funding.

Vandersypen’s consortium will explore the questions that emerge in quantum physics at the limits of mass, space, time, and complexity by studying engineered nanosystems.

“We would like to make these two worlds meet—to make the particles where we can control quantum effects larger and make the particles where we can measure the gravitational effect smaller so that they come together,” Vandersypen says. To do so, they will use nanoscale objects to test whether gravitational forces can produce entanglement.

Researchers produce entanglement all the time in the lab by using electric or magnetic forces to manipulate quantum states. But whether gravity—the attraction that exists between any two objects—can also entangle particles remains an open question. Answering that question might allow researchers to reconcile the theories of relativity with the theory of quantum physics.

The consortium also hopes to establish a size limit for the quantum domain and to see how large and complex a system in quantum superposition can be. And they may indirectly investigate quantum granularity—the idea that units of space and time may be indivisible beyond a certain point.

Such answers could enable new breakthroughs in our fundamental grasp of physics. The consortium will use the funding to “push the boundary of our understanding,” Vandersypen says.

Dekker and Koenderink’s consortium will probe a different boundary of our understanding—that separating life from nonlife. The project aims to build a synthetic cell from lifeless biomolecules such as lipids, DNA, and proteins with the aim of understanding biological life more deeply.

“What is the smallest building block of life as we know it? How do nonliving molecules together make a living cell?” says Koenderink, who is co-director of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft. The consortium hopes to answer these questions by attempting to build a living cell “from the ground up.”

Beyond the overarching question of what life is, the researchers hope to address how cells grow, self-replicate, communicate, and evolve. While the field lacks a consensus definition for life, Koenderink says, many researchers consider these characteristics to be its fundamental operating principles.

The consortium consists of 31 research groups, about half at TU Delft and half elsewhere in the Netherlands, which will focus on replicating various functions within a synthetic cell. Some of these functions are further along than others. For example, researchers can already set up protein systems that recycle and produce energy; express proteins from a synthetic genome; and build minimal machineries that deform the cellular membrane, mimicking the start of cell division. Ultimately, the groups will try to integrate the functions they build so they work together in a cell in an organized way.

To address the ethical concerns inherent in trying to replicate life, the consortium has embedded ethicists alongside the scientists in each group to guide decision-making and to ensure the cells they are building are safe. Koenderink says a synthetic cell would be “extremely dependent on the laboratory environment and unlikely to survive outside it.” But including the guidance of ethicists from the outset will help them foresee and avoid potential risks such as escape, crossbreeding, and misuse of the technology as the science advances.

In addition to funding Ph.D. students and postdocs, the grants will help the institute foster and attract more talented group leaders. “We have a lot of tenure-track, early-career scientists who will get a real boost out of this [funding] to build up their groups,” Koenderink says. Vandersypen’s consortium, which comprises eight core investigators from TU Delft and Leiden University, will use the funding to attract six new investigators.

The grants will also help the consortia connect with collaborative efforts happening internationally. For example, Dekker and Koenderink’s consortium will help to grow the European Synthetic Cell Initiative and will connect with similar consortia worldwide such as Build-A-Cell and the SynCell Asia Initiative.

Dekker and Vandersypen have collaborated before on a project to detect the movement of a DNA molecule through a graphene nanopore, but this time their projects are unlikely to overlap. The grants fund diverse areas of research: other awards went to consortia studying regenerative medicine and social cohesion and predicting impacts from climate change.

Marcel Levi, president of the Dutch Research Council, says that Dekker and Vandersypen’s previous collaboration demonstrates they are among the world’s top scientists. The Summit grants will enable them to contribute important new knowledge to society and to train a new generation of researchers.

The grant selection process was competitive, Vandersypen says: each university in the Netherlands was limited to two applications. “Out of the five winning consortia of the whole country, two were from TU Delft, and both came from the Kavli Institute,” he says. “I think that’s really remarkable.”