We describe a multicellular approach to control a target cell population endowed with a bistable toggle-switch. The idea is to engineer a synthetic microbial consortium consisting of three different cell populations. In such a consortium, two populations, the Togglers, responding to some reference input, can induce the switch of a bistable memory mechanism in a third population, the Targets, so as to activate or deactivate some additional functionalities in the cells. Communication among the three populations is established by orthogonal quorum sensing molecules that are used to close a feedback control loop across the populations. The control design is validated via in-silico experiments in BSim, a realistic agent-based simulator of bacterial populations.

中文翻译：

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微生物群落中遗传拨动开关的多细胞反馈控制

我们描述了一种多细胞方法来控制赋予双稳态拨动开关的目标细胞群体。这个想法是设计一个由三个不同细胞群组成的合成微生物联盟。在这样的财团中，响应某些参考输入的两个种群Togglers可以诱导第三种群Targets中双稳态记忆机制的转换，从而激活或停用细胞中的一些其他功能。三个群体之间的交流是通过正交群体感应分子建立的，该分子用于关闭群体之间的反馈控制环。通过在BSim中进行的计算机模拟实验验证了对照设计，BSim是一种基于细菌的真实媒介模拟程序。