ArticleNature communications2020
De novo design of an intercellular signaling toolbox for multi-channel cell-cell communication and biological computation.
Article in Nature communications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers.
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Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed, 104 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Microbial consortia for the conversion of biomass into fuels and chemicals.Nature communications · 2025Review
- Improving engineered biological systems with electronics and microfluidics.Nature biotechnology · 2025Review
- Developing Quorum Sensing-Based Collaborative Dynamic Control System in Halomonas TD01.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Multi-Layer Autocatalytic Feedback Enables Integral Control Amidst Resource Competition and Across Scales.ACS synthetic biology · 2025Article
- Engineering intercellular communication using M13 phagemid and CRISPR-based gene regulation for multicellular computing in Escherichia coli.Nature communications · 2025Article
- 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
- Contact area and tissue growth dynamics shape synthetic juxtacrine signaling patterns.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Strategies and tools to construct stable and efficient artificial coculture systems as biosynthetic platforms for biomass conversion.Biotechnology for biofuels and bioproducts · 2024Review
- Engineering signalling pathways in mammalian cells.Nature biomedical engineering · 2024Review
- Assembly of functional microbial ecosystems: from molecular circuits to communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2024Review
- DyMMM-LEAPS: An ML-based framework for modulating evenness and stability in synthetic microbial communities.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- Engineering Tunable, Low Latency Spatial Computation with Dual Input Quorum Sensing Promoters.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
14 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Intercellular signaling is indispensable for single cells to form complex biological structures, such as biofilms, tissues and organs. The genetic tools available for engineering intercellular signaling, however, are quite limited. Here we exploit the chemical diversity of biological small molecules to de novo design a genetic toolbox for high-performance, multi-channel cell-cell communications and biological computations. By biosynthetic pathway design for signal molecules, rational engineering of sensing promoters and directed evolution of sensing transcription factors, we obtain six cell-cell signaling channels in bacteria with orthogonality far exceeding the conventional quorum sensing systems and successfully transfer some of them into yeast and human cells. For demonstration, they are applied in cell consortia to generate bacterial colony-patterns using up to four signaling channels simultaneously and to implement distributed bio-computation containing seven different strains as basic units. This intercellular signaling toolbox paves the way for engineering complex multicellularity including artificial ecosystems and smart tissues.
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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.