Research | Joseph Research Group

The goal of our research group is to determine the principles governing intracellular compartmentalization and to employ these rules for bioengineering. When we consider intracellular organization, we often picture different regions of the cell forming tiny membrane-bound compartments, like ribosomes and mitochondria. However, many important micro-environments inside the cell are not enclosed by membranes. For decades, scientists have wondered how do these "membraneless" organelles (more generally termed biomolecular condensates) arise, and how are their structures maintained without physical membranes? Recent ground-breaking experiments have proposed the transformative paradigm of "liquid-liquid phase separation", which suggests that the physical chemistry of phase-separation of multicomponent mixtures sustains such micro-environments: Analogous to the separation of oil and water into distinct liquid phases, biomolecules (proteins, RNA, DNA) in the cytoplasm and nucleoplasm exhibit at

The goal of our research group is to determine the principles governing intracellular compartmentalization and to employ these rules for bioengineering. When we consider intracellular organization, we often picture different regions of the cell forming tiny membrane-bound compartments, like ribosomes and mitochondria. However, many important micro-environments inside the cell are not enclosed by membranes. For decades, scientists have wondered how do these "membraneless" organelles (more generally termed biomolecular condensates) arise, and how are their structures maintained without physical