Here, we present a specific biological implementation of this general distributed pattern recognition system concept using a model of synthetic gene regulatory circuits in engineered cell populations.
With regard to a possible biological implementation of this theory, the evolution properties of the presented scale-space models are governed by diffusion equations, which can be implemented by operations over neighborhoods.
There is, however, for the time being no clear evidence supporting any real biological implementation of these simple computational architectures.
Biological implementations of mutual inhibition circuits are plentiful and they have even been studied in some elegant synthetic gene circuits where two transcription factors mutually repress each other.
It is hard to bridge the gap between mathematical formulations and biological implementations of Turing patterns, yet this is necessary for both understanding and engineering these networks with synthetic biology approaches.
Our solution features a significantly lower cost in terms of time, the number and size of strands, as well as the simplicity of the biological implementation.
In our biological implementation, the activator corresponds to hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), and the inhibitor is a truncated variant of HGF, named NK4.
To ground the implementation in a biological context, the implementation is based on a model of the escape swim network of Tritonia diomedea, a marine mollusk.
It should be clarified that the definition of clusters implemented here is based on "who does mate with whom" rather than "who can mate with whom", and thus we have described it as being inspired by, rather than being an explicit implementation of, the biological species concept.
Clotho is a software implementation of platform-based design for synthetic biological systems.
