Reported by: WANG Ji
Photographed by: YAN Mingxing
Translated by: REN Shaorui
Edited by: Garrick Jones
Date: July 25, 2017
With the support of National Natural Science Foundation, the team led by Professor HAN Xiaojun, a member of the State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resources and Water Environment from HIT School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, made significant progress in the field of artificial cell research. Their article A Fissionable Artificial Eukaryote-like Cell Model was published in the international journal entitled Journal of The American Chemical Society (JACS, Impact Factor 13.858). In this article, Professor HAN Xiaojun is the only corresponding author and HIT is the sole signature unit.
Artificial cell is one of the important researches in the field of biomimetic membrane. It is a simplified model by artificial construction and can effectively overcome many problems in traditional cell research, thus providing a simple and effective model for cell life activity research, helpful to study the interaction mechanism of intracellular and intercellular molecules. This study successfully used osmotic pressure to induce giant phospholipid vesicle deformation and prepared a eukaryote cell model. What's more, it loaded the genetic information substance DNA in the "nucleus", achieving DNA amplification in "nucleus" through Polymerization Chain Reaction (PCR). This cell model also has the function of splitting and generating offspring "eukaryote cells". The novelty and importance of the study were fully and highly appreciated by the reviewers. In recent years, this research group has made a series of progress in the field of bionic membrane with the achievements of a series of research articles.
Professor HAN Xiaojun worked in the UK for many years. From 2009, he began to work at HIT with the identity of talent introduction and presided over 18 research projects such as National Natural Science Foundation, New Century Talents Fund of Ministry of Education and the like, so far publishing 95 SCI articles.
Article link: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.7b04009
Personal home page: http://homepage.hit.edu.cn/xiaojunhan
