Mimicking the diversity and complexity that life on Earth has achieved, using only a handful of building blocks, such as proteins, nucleic acids, and sugars, is an overwhelmingly difficult problem. Life, as we see it around us, is the results of millions of years of selection and evolution. This makes retracing the path life has traversed within experimental timescales a patently absurd task. In this talk, I would like to propose and show a few examples of a relatively inexpensive and tractable way of exploring ‘possible biology’ using soft and active ingredients, and the laws of physics. With approaches like catalysis, reconfiguration, self-replication, targeted assembly, etc., my research broadly aims to provide a generalised design principle for the self-assembly of synthetic components towards exhibiting life-like properties, such as motility, growth, division, morphogenesis, adaptability, and evolvability.

In my talk, I will describe three distinct systems. First, I will discuss directed assemblies designed using lipid-membrane-coated anisotropic colloids as building blocks to achieve flexible, efficient, and robust structural designs. These systems can self-replicate but lack adaptability. Next, I will discuss systems that exhibit dissipation-driven dynamics, inspired by biological and synthetic active matter. Using active droplet building blocks, I have created flexible and reconfigurable assemblies that exhibit self-propulsion dynamics, configurational rigidity, and adaptation to chemical and physical changes in their environments. Finally, I will discuss a novel approach to mimicking life-like properties in artificial matter, inspired by the ‘origin of life’ hypothesis that modern cells evolved from primitive compartments or protocells. We create membrane-less compartments through liquid-liquid phase separation of charged polymers. These compartments not only support the auto-catalytic selfassembly of ribozymes but also offer a platform to explore mimicking cellular growth and division. I will conclude with a brief overview of my future research plan.