The origins of life meet microfluidics

Camila Betterelli Giuliano, PhD candidate for ProtoMet (studying the biochemistry of the origins of life through pH-controlled droplet microfluidics), presents the connection between the origins of life and microfluidics.

“Besides the tremendous advances in science in recent years, the details surrounding the origins of life remain elusive. How we moved from a soup of primordial molecules to a complex compartmentalized structure, like the cell, is still unclear, but microfluidics can help us find some answers. Droplet-based microfluidics, in particular, is being used to form compartmentalized structures that can resemble the ones we believe could be found in early Earth and give us clues of how they came to be.”