Matter to Life Fall Days

The Max Planck School Matter to Life holds biannual conferences, which are primarily for the Fellows (PIs/ Professors) and students of the school. Each edition of the conference is hosted by one of its partner institutes, and this fall MPI-PKS, under the guidance of Frank Jülicher, had the pleasure of hosting the event. The topic of the conference could be described under the broad umbrella of Matter to Life, which is an interdisciplinary approach to study how, when and why matter transitions to life, and the physical, chemical and biological principles of this.

Matter to Life fellows from Dresden, Anthony Hyman & Stephan Grill (MPI-CBG) and Stefan Diez (TU Dresden), were joined by those from other parts of Germany. This included Tobias Erb & Victor Sourjik (MPI-Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg), Andrea Mussachio (MPI-Molecular Physiology, Dortmund), Andrij Pich (DWI-Leibniz Institute, Aachen), and Tanja Weil (MPI-Polymer Research, Mainz). Their talks on their current research along with those from senior PhD candidates of the school, covered a wide array of topics; biomolecular condensates, mechanics of nuclear periphery, motility in bacteria or diatoms, colloidal systems and their applications, to name a few.

The talks were supplemented by a workshop conducted by members of Thorsten Moos’s group (Heidelberg University) on ethics of synthetic organoids. Students took center stage and played members of an ethics committee to decide the fate of a hypothetical project that pushed the boundaries of our current ethical considerations. The poster presentation session and the lab visits to MPI-CBG ensured the program was interactive and dynamic for early-stage students and researchers. The program concluded with a keynote speech by Miki Ebisuya (TU Dresden), who presented her fascinating work on biological clocks, and the development of a Stem cell zoo in order to better answer her research questions.

The attendees were Faculty and students from diverse backgrounds of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, and this guaranteed a truly interdisciplinary discussion, knowledge exchange, and hopefully fruitful collaborations in the field of Matter to Life.