Tremendous progress has been made on engineering individual cells in the previous years. Recently a team led by Rice University researchers described the creation of a system that encourages cooperation between two distinct populations of Escherichia coli. One strain was engineered to produce an orthogonal cell-signaling molecule that "activates" the expression of a "repressor" signaling molecule in the second population strains. This "repressor" travels back and suppresses the production of the activator. The two strains were found to generate emergent, population-level oscillations only when cultured together. The development of this synthetic microbial consortium establishes a platform for testing the relation between population-level dynamics and genetic-level regulation, which could be a step forward toward engineering synthetic tissues and organs of multiple cell types.
General Biosystems offers high-throughput Gene Synthesis and Biosystem Optimization services to facilitate your research in constructing complex gene circuits and engineering advanced synthetic biosystems.
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