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Science, art & fun facts

Planet membrane

 

If we compute the total surface of all cellular life combined, we obtain an area that is much larger that the surface of the Earth: with all the bio-membrane available we could wrap our planet many times over!

Sunflowers.png

Blossoming

Baking in high-speed electrons at -190 °C, these tiny sunflowers don’t let their delicate beauty to be troubled.

Discover more about them here:

Weismehl et al., BiorXiv

Credits: Marius Weismehl & Nicola De Franceschi

Dumbbelll's Soup Cans.png

Credits: Nicola De Franceschi

Dumbbell's Soup Cans

This image was inspired by Andy Warhol's famous "Campbell's Soup Cans" and it illustrates the findings of our most recent Nature Nanotechnology paper.

There we show how Dynamin A can induce hemi-scission and full scission in dumbbell-shaped liposomes. The ratio shown in this image reflects the ratio we see in our experiments.

De Franceschi et al., 2023 Nature Nanotechnology

Credits: Nicola De Franceschi

TeleMicroscopy

Liposomes floating in a dish or planet collision in deep space?

 

These objects are phase-separated giant vesicles, the bright orange islands being region of ordered lipid phase.

Membrane

DNA

Merged

One of these two images depicts the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, which by multiple cell division events forms characteristic "chains" of cells. 

The other is a synthetic structure reconstituted by the SMS technology using synthetic membranes and purified phage DNA.

Can you guess which is the synthetic one?

 

red hot final cropped.png

Credits: Nicola De Franceschi

Space Oddity

An alien landscape, but much closer to us than it seems.

Credits: Vincent van Gogh & Nicola De Franceschi

Synthetic Night

My humble nanoscale interpretation of van Gogh’s masterpiece

Subject:

Provence Landscape &

RNA Origami Filaments on Supported Lipid Bilayer

Technique:

Oil on Canvans &

Atomic Force Microscopy

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