Projects per year
Abstract
Living cells sense and process environmental cues through noisy biochemical mechanisms. This apparatus limits the scope of engineering cells as viable sensors. Here, we highlight a mechanism that enables robust, population-wide responses to external stimulation based on cellular communication, known as quorum sensing. We propose a synthetic circuit consisting of two mutually repressing quorum sensing modules. At low cell densities the system behaves like a genetic toggle switch, while at higher cell densities the behaviour of nearby cells is coupled via diffusible quorum sensing molecules. We show by systematic coarse graining that at large length and timescales that the system can be described using the Ising model of a ferromagnet. Thus, in analogy with magnetic systems, the sensitivity of the population-wide response, or its ‘susceptibility’ to a change in the external signal, is highly enhanced for a narrow range of cell-cell coupling close to a critical value. We expect that our approach will be used to enhance the sensitivity of synthetic bio-sensing networks.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 033502 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment |
Volume | 2017 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 9 Mar 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Mar 2017 |
Research Groups and Themes
- BrisSynBio
- Bristol BioDesign Institute
- Engineering Mathematics Research Group
Keywords
- synthetic biology
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Dive into the research topics of 'Statistical mechanics of tuned cell signalling: sensitive collective response by synthetic biological circuits'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Computational Approaches to In Vivo Cell Signalling: Inference, Network Structure and Dynamic Decision-Making
Voliotis, M. (Principal Investigator)
15/04/13 → 15/04/16
Project: Research