The goal of bottom-up synthetic biology culminates in the assembly of an entire cell from separate biological building blocks. One major challenge resides in the in vitro production and implementation of complex genetic and metabolic pathways that can support essential cellular functions. Here, we show that phospholipid biosynthesis, a multiple-step process involved in cell membrane homeostasis, can be reconstituted starting from the genes encoding for all necessary proteins. A total of eight E. coli enzymes for acyl transfer and headgroup modifications were produced in a cell-free gene expression system and were co-translationally reconstituted in liposomes. Acyl-coenzyme A and glycerol-3-phosphate were used as canonical precursors to generate a variety of important bacterial lipids. Moreover, this study demonstrates that two-step acyl transfer can occur from enzymes synthesized inside vesicles. Besides clear implications for growth and potentially division of a synthetic cell, we postulate that gene-based lipid biosynthesis can become instrumental for ex vivo and protein purification-free production of natural and non-natural lipids.@en

This paper considers the scenario of a big new energy source connecting to an existing network of generators and loads. To be able to maintain such a network at the correct settings, the well known load flow equations have to be solved. Since existing software has trouble with solving the load flow equations in the scenario of a very large generator, new software was created using Matlab’s inherent fsolve function. This software was consequently used in combination with existing software of the MATPOWER package to calculate the optimal way of connecting a new large generator to an existing network. This was done for a relatively small case using a brute force method which iterated over all possible options. @en