PhD defense Mareike Berger

PhD student Mareike Berger successfully defended her thesis ‘Controlling DNA replication initiation: from living to synthetic cells’ at the Vrije Universiteit on May 3rd. Berger carried out her doctoral research in the group of Pieter Rein ten Wolde (Biochemical Networks). With her research Berger contributes to the research program BaSyC (Building a Synthetic Cell), which aims to create an autonomous, self-reproducing synthetic cell with a bottom-up approach.

About the thesis
The bacterium E. coli initiates replication once per cell cycle at a precise volume per origin and adds on average a constant volume between successive initiation events, independent of the initiation size. Yet, a molecular model that can explain these observations has so far been lacking. In her thesis Berger describes various models. Read more about her thesis.