Morphogenetic Engineering of Bacterial Colonies.

We combine synthetic biology approaches, biophysical modeling and CRISPR/Cas for the engineering of morphogenetic mechanisms in bacterial colonies. We have created a system for prototyping morphogenesis starting from a single cell. We defined and implemented two elementary functions, symmetry-breaking and domain-specific cell regulation, and used characterized gene regulatory mechanisms to improve the design-build-test cycle.

This toolkit is enabling the study of morphogenetic principles and the engineering of artificial shapes. We are currently expanding this toolkit to include artificial cell-cell signaling, colony size controllers and metabolic cross-feeding mechanisms to explore the implementation of higher order designs from core structures. Our long term goal is to define computationally abstracted rules and elementary functions that make morphogenetic engineering more predictable, tractable and scalable.