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Then we put forward two questions: Why phase separation in cells can produce membraneless organelles? And how can we design our system to fulfill its intended functions? Like oil in water, the contents of cells can separate into droplets. According to physical principles, the process where material self-assemble into organelles is described as ‘phase separation’, which is the conversion of a single-phase system into a multiphase system. In general, materials flow to regions with low chemical potential instead of low concentration. Finally, the components no longer distribute uniformly but form granules locally which are organelles in the cell. That is to say, the main work to synthesize an organelle is to fulfill phase separation in a cell. Then, how can we do it? Composition can switch rapidly through changes in scaffold concentration or multivalency. And our design was inspired by recent works showing that multivalency drives protein phase separation and formation of synthetic organelles. What’s more, we take our inspiration from existing life systems and previous works. For example, Intrinsic Disordered Regions are the symbol of massive phase separation in the cell. They interact with each other through the van der Waals force, hydrophobic effect and electrostatic attraction. And there are many interactions like this in nature, such as FKBP and FRB, SUMO and SIM, SH3 and PRM, phyB and PIF6. Thus, we can make good use of them to induce our designed organelles and regulate them variously.! In a conclusion，multivalency drives protein’s -self-assemblyies and interaction binds the parts together. It means, interaction can induce phase separation and multivalency can make larger assemblies, which are two essential elementmodules in our design and ensure the formation of synthetic organelles.
