The introduction of synthetic intercellular communication into the cell engineering toolbox will open up new frontiers and will greatly contribute to the future success of synthetic biology and its clinical applications.
Although not discussed here, it is important to note that there has been considerable progress in developing synthetic cellular communication in eukaryotes such as mammalian cells and yeast, which has been surveyed in the literature [51],[51],[51].
First, the mammalian single plasma membrane lends itself well to synthetic cell cell communication applications because it can be easily traversed by fusions with secretory protein signal peptides.
Moreover, a triple-input AND logic gated biosensor comprising two cell consortia was also constructed which can sense and integrate three environmental signals (As3+, Hg2+and Cu2+ levels) via a synthetic cell cell communication module driving the cooperation between the two cell populations.
Bacchus, W. et al. Synthetic two-way communication between mammalian cells.
Subject areas covered include Biochemistry, Bioengineering, Bioinformatics, Biophysics, Cancer Biology, Cell Biology, Developmental Biology, Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Immunology, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Molecular Medicine, Neuroscience, Paleontology, Pathology, Physiology, Plant Biology, Scientific Communication, Synthetic Biology, Systems Biology, and Zoology.
We further highlight how such circuits could be interconnected to achieve higher-order control networks such as synthetic hormone-like communication systems in animals or synthetic ecosystems with dynamic interspecies crosstalk.
Indeed, one of the greatest challenges in synthetic biology is communication with scientists from other disciplines.
After characterization and optimization of the sender/receiver cell population as well of the processing cell population we set up the synthetic cell-cell communication network for the detection of population borders.
