Overview

Since the emergence of Synthetic Biology, bacteria have been engineered to perform a wide variety of simple tasks. They can be made to express proteins, respond to their environment and communicate primitively with each other. Presently, a key goal for the field is to create a communicating, organised and differentiated population of bacteria that can be considered a multicellular organism, capable of performing even more complex tasks. To realize this goal requires the development of systems for rapid, robust communication and self-organised differentiation. Our project sets the foundation for future research in engineered multi-cellularity by pursuing electrical and peptide signalling, and cellular self-differentiation through spontaneous spatial patterning.