Phase Separation in biochemistry

Inside living cells and in synthetic mixtures that mimic the primordial soup, droplets can form via phase separation. Often, these systems are composed many components that undergo chemical reactions.I develop theoretical physics tools to characterize such mixtures’s dynamics.

In particular, I have studied molecular transitions among heteropolymers immersed in a solvent, and found that chemical fuel leads to new kinetics pathways such as vacuole formation (Biophysical Journal, 2021). I have utilized the framework of chemical reactions to generalize the theory of wetting to the presence of surface binding (New Journal of Physics 2021). These ideas have been tested experimentally for the first time in collaboration with the Honigmann, and Hyman labs, at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics, in Dresden ( eLife 2025, bioRxiv, 2025). The very fruitful collaboration with the Homigmann lab has been founded by the DFG Priority Program 2191: Molecular Mechanisms of Functional Phase Separation. I have also investigated phase separation in solutions of modular biomolecules that can form assemblies of arbitrary size and interact among themselves, in collaboration with Thomas Michaels at ETH Zürich. The results I have obtained include the gelation of condensed phases and the change in condensate volume during ageing, and are consistent with recent in vitro experimental observations (eLife, accepted in 2023).

I had the opportunity to work in collaboration with the Braun and Mast lab (Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich) and the Boekhoven lab (Technical University of Munich). These labs are performing cutting-edge experiments to unravel the role of phase separation in syntetic and prebiotic-like mixtures that mimic the primordial soup in vitro. In particular, together with the Braun and Mast lab, we demonstrated that phase separation offers a route for sequence selection in mixtures of oligonucleotides (PNAS, 2023, arXiv 2024). With the Boekhoven lab, on the other hand, found a new out-of-equilibrium stationary state composed of vacuoles in an experiment with simple chemical compounds (Nat. Comm. 2023). Finally, I contributed to scrutinizing under which conditions liquid shells are stable compared to regimes where droplets divide (PRR, 2023).

Finally, in a series of projects lead by Jonathan Bauermann, we discovered a critical transition that affects droplets in the presence of active chemical reactions (PRX 2025). In particular, this transition affects droplet stationary size, morphology, but also their division propensity and ripening. We then generalized the theory of Lifshitz-Slyosov-Wagner (LSW) to account for active chemical reactions (PRL, 2025). Finally, we have investigated chemical oscillators in the presence of phase separation. We found that the presence of phases affects oscillation amplitude and frequency (arXiv 2025).