Reconstituting bacterial cell division assemblies in crowded, phase-separated media

This article is dedicated to the memory of all the victims of the coronavirus pandemic.Here we have summarized several strategies to reconstruct complexes containing the FtsZ protein, a central element of the cell division machinery in most bacteria, and to test their functional organization in minimal membrane systems and cell-like containers, as vesicles and droplets produced by microfluidics. These synthetic systems have been devised to mimic elements of the intracellular complexity, as excluded volume effects due to natural crowding, and macromolecular condensation resulting from biologically regulated liquid-liquid phase separation, in media of known and controllable composition. This integrative approach has allowed to demonstrate that macromolecular phase separation and crowding may also help to dynamically organize FtsZ in the intracellular space thus modulating its functional reactivity in cell division.This work was supported by the Spanish government (BFU2014-52070-C2-2-P, BFU2016-75471-C2-1-P, 2019AEP088, and PID2019-104544GB-I00). M.A.R.-R. was supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación and the European Social Fund through grant BES-2017-082003.Peer reviewe