ArticleNature2011
Distributed biological computation with multicellular engineered networks.
Article in Nature, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 147 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
147 citing papers in PubMed.
- Living circuit boards built by printing bacterial transistors.Nature chemical biology · 2026Article
- Burden-aware feedback control of microbial consortia.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Eco-Inspired terraform networks emerge from material self-organization.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Gene circuit-based sensors.Fundamental research · 2025Review
- Why cellular computations challenge our design principles.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Standardized Quorum Sensing Tools for Gram-Negative Bacteria.ACS synthetic biology · 2025Article
- Dynamic Transcription Machineries in Protocells.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Review
- Genetic designs for stochastic and probabilistic biocomputing.Physical review. E · 2025Article
- Engineering intercellular communication using M13 phagemid and CRISPR-based gene regulation for multicellular computing in Escherichia coli.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Review
- Partitioning of a 2-bit hash function across 66 communicating cells.Nature chemical biology · 2025Article
- Phage-mediated intercellular CRISPRi for biocomputation in bacterial consortia.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Uptake and leakage rates differentially shape community arrangement and composition of microbial consortia.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Open problems in synthetic multicellularity.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Programming Surface Motility and Modulating Physiological Behaviors of Bacteria via Biosurfactant-Mimetic Polyurethanes.ACS applied materials & interfaces · 2024Article
- Laccase is a multitasking protein for synthetic gene circuits in the yeastSynthetic and systems biotechnology · 2024Article
- Emergent digital bio-computation through spatial diffusion and engineered bacteria.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Biocomputation: Moving Beyond Turing with Living Cellular Computers.Communications of the ACM · 2024Article
- Exploring Sustainable Agriculture with Nitrogen-Fixing Cyanobacteria and Nanotechnology.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- DNA as a universal chemical substrate for computing and data storage.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2024Review
87 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ongoing efforts within synthetic and systems biology have been directed towards the building of artificial computational devices using engineered biological units as basic building blocks. Such efforts, inspired in the standard design of electronic circuits, are limited by the difficulties arising from wiring the basic computational units (logic gates) through the appropriate connections, each one to be implemented by a different molecule. Here, we show that there is a logically different form of implementing complex Boolean logic computations that reduces wiring constraints thanks to a redundant distribution of the desired output among engineered cells. A practical implementation is presented using a library of engineered yeast cells, which can be combined in multiple ways. Each construct defines a logic function and combining cells and their connections allow building more complex synthetic devices. As a proof of principle, we have implemented many logic functions by using just a few engineered cells. Of note, small modifications and combination of those cells allowed for implementing more complex circuits such as a multiplexer or a 1-bit adder with carry, showing the great potential for re-utilization of small parts of the circuit. Our results support the approach of using cellular consortia as an efficient way of engineering complex tasks not easily solvable using single-cell implementations.
Indexed as
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21150900What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.