Publications by Zoe Newell Swank

An automated do-it-yourself system for dynamic stem cell and organoid culture in standard multi-well plates

Matthias Lütolf, Sebastian Maerkl, Hao-An Hsiung, Zoe Newell Swank, Stefano Davide Vianello, Julia Tischler

We present a low-cost, do-it-yourself system for complexmammalian cell culture under dynamically changing medium formulations by integrating conventional multi-well tissue culture plates with simple microfluidic control and system automation. We demonstrat ...

2022

A high-throughput microfluidic nanoimmunoassay for detecting anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in serum or ultralow-volume blood samples

Sebastian Maerkl, Hon Ming Andrew Yip, Zoe Newell Swank, Grégoire Michielin

Novel technologies are needed to facilitate large-scale detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) specific antibodies in human blood samples. Such technologies are essential to support seroprevalence studies and vaccine clin ...

National Academy of Sciences2021

Bottom-Up Construction of Complex Biomolecular Systems With Cell-Free Synthetic Biology

Sebastian Maerkl, Laura Sophie Grasemann, Zoe Newell Swank, Barbora Lavickova, Grégoire Michielin, Nadanai Laohakunakorn, Amir Shahein

Cell-free systems offer a promising approach to engineer biology since their open nature allows for well-controlled and characterized reaction conditions. In this review, we discuss the history and recent developments in engineering recombinant and crude e ...

2020

High-throughput microfluidic platforms for characterizing and engineering cell-free gene regulatory circuits

Zoe Newell Swank

Cell-free systems have emerged as a versatile platform for constructing complex biological systems from the bottom-up. In particular, they enable the rapid engineering and characterization of gene regulatory networks, a critical cellular subsystem that all ...

EPFL2020

A Multilayer Microfluidic Platform for the Conduction of Prolonged Cell-Free Gene Expression

Sebastian Maerkl, Zoe Newell Swank

2019

Cell-free gene-regulatory network engineering with synthetic transcription factors

Sebastian Maerkl, Zoe Newell Swank, Nadanai Laohakunakorn

Gene-regulatory networks are ubiquitous in nature and critical for bottom-up engineering of synthetic networks. Transcriptional repression is a fundamental function that can be tuned at the level of DNA, protein, and cooperative protein-protein interaction ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

Microfluidic device for real-time formulation of reagents and their subsequent encapsulation into double emulsions

Esther Amstad, Sebastian Maerkl, Zoe Newell Swank, Jui-Chia Chang

Emulsion drops are often employed as picoliter-sized containers to perform screening assays. These assays usually entail the formation of drops encompassing discrete objects such as cells or microparticles and reagents to study interactions between the dif ...

Nature Research2018

GreA and GreB Enhance Expression of Escherichia coil RNA Polymerase Promoters in a Reconstituted Transcription-Translation System

Sebastian Maerkl, Zoe Newell Swank, Henrike Marie Niederholtmeyer

Cell-free environments are becoming viable alternatives for implementing biological networks in synthetic biology. The reconstituted cell-free expression system (PURE) allows characterization of genetic networks under defined conditions but its applicabili ...

Amer Chemical Soc2016