Synthetic Multi-cellular Circuits in Bacteria Using Engineered Phages for Cell-to-Cell Communication
Résumé
Microbial communities and multicellular organisms have evolved diverse strategies to efficiently allocate available resources, achieved through task distribution among specialised cells within the community or the organism. This intricate division of labour relies on the exchange of signalling molecules, facilitating communication and effective execution of distributed tasks. Drawing inspiration from such natural systems, we have developed a synthetic communication system in Escherichia coli cells by re-purposing M13 bacteriophage particles as messengers. Leveraging the easily programmable and high-payload capacity phage DNA, we have engineered a system composed of sender bacteria that transmit phage particles and receiver bacteria that receive these as signals. Once the phage infects the receiver bacterium, the encoded DNA message can be expressed as programmed. Using our phage-bacterial communication system, we have developed functional multicellular circuits representing several logic gates. The receiver cells process the available inputs to perform computations and generate a logical output.