Microfluidic careers

My Microfluidics Career | Camila Betterelli Giuliano & the origins of life

origins of life Elveflow microfluidics career Camila Betterelli

My microfluidics career – Origins of life

What can you achieve with microfluidics? What are the practical applications of microfluidics to a field of research, and how could microfluidics help your research career?

We asked our own Elveflow research teams for you. Our Microfluidics Careers pages give you a no frills, realistic idea of the wide variety of projects that can benefit from microfluidics.

Camila Betterelli Giuliano is working on the ProtoMet project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 MSCA-ITN under grant agreement No 813873.

What is the most interesting thing about your project?

My project is about shining a light on the origins of life, which I find pretty cool!

The idea is to try to recreate chemical reactions that could be plausible on Earth before life emerged, and hopefully better understand how these processes eventually became what we know as life today. We are working on several fronts as an European H2020 Consortium under the Marie-Curie Actions, and right now I’m working on assembling protocells with microfluidics.

Basically, I’m trying to recreate lipid vesicles, using microfluidics to encapsulate chemical reactions that could have happened in early Earth. Then, by tightly controlling these reactions, we can start to understand what factors influence them and how being in a confined environment (the lipid vesicle, representing an early cell membrane) could confer advantages when compared to staying free in solution.

“I’m trying to recreate lipid vesicles, using microfluidics to encapsulate chemical reactions that could have happened in early Earth.”

How did you transition from your previous research field to microfluidics?

01 origins of life Camila Betterelli Giuliano on the lab ELVEFLOW MICROFLUIDICS

I have a quite hybrid background. I’m a biotech engineer but, for most of my career, I worked with business and innovation. I decided that I wanted to keep working with business and innovation, but closer to science, so I decided to do an industrial PhD.

The opportunity to work with microfluidics came when I found the PhD position at Elvesys, which gave me the opportunity to do research inside a startup, completely in line with my goal of working in between business and science. And microfluidics aligns really well with my previous background as a biotech engineer, allowing me to exercise my engineering capabilities and apply them to chemistry and biology, so I think it was spot-on!

On this project, what are you doing that would be impossible without microfluidics?

Most of the protocols for making lipid vesicles in bulk end up with a final product that has lipid vesicles of several different sizes, which is not great in terms of experimental reproducibility.

There are ways of homogenizing them but that adds an additional step to the production. Also, if you want to make lipid vesicles inside lipid vesicles (called multivesicular vesicles or vesosomes), to mimic eukaryotic cells, it is very complicated to control how many vesicles are encapsulated.

Microfluidics solves all these problems. It is possible to control the size of the lipid vesicles during the production in a very reliable and reproducible way and you can control what you put inside them way more efficiently than with other methods.

“Our goal is to use these multivesicular vesicles as tools to shine a light into the origins of life.”

How does this project push back the current state of the art?

Most of the reactions used inside lipid vesicles, especially when we talk about vesicles inside vesicles, are usually model reactions, only to prove that it is possible to control the chemical reactions inside these confined/hierarchical structures, but they don’t really provide any insight into biochemical or metabolic pathways.

Our goal is to use these multivesicular vesicles as tools to shine a light into the origins of life, so we want to use more chemically relevant reactions and provide answers to research questions that go beyond: “yes, we can use them as tools.”

Do you already know what challenges in research you want to tackle next?

The next step in my project is to think more about the environment that surrounded these early Earth chemical reactions and compartments. So, my goal will be to design a microfluidics platform to closely control pH, which is an important parameter for prebiotic Earth.