A Survey of Biological Building Blocks for Synthetic Molecular Communication Systems

Abstract

The design and implementation of synthetic molecular communication systems (MCSs) at nanoand microscale are very challenging. This is particularly true for synthetic MCSs employing biological components as transmitters and receivers or as interfaces with natural biological MCSs. Nevertheless, since such biological components have been optimized by nature over billions of years, using them in synthetic MCSs is highly promising. This paper provides a survey of biological components that can potentially serve as the main building blocks, i.e., transmitter, receiver, and signaling particles, for the design and implementation of synthetic MCSs. Nature uses a large variety of signaling particles of different sizes and with vastly different properties for communication among biological entities. Here, we focus on three important classes of signaling particles: cations (specifically protons and calcium ions), neurotransmitters (specifically acetylcholine, dopamine, and serotonin), and phosphopeptides. These three classes have unique and distinct features such as their large diffusion coefficients, their specificity, and/or their uniqueness of signaling that make them suitable candidates for signaling particles in synthetic MCSs. For each of these candidate signaling particles, we present several specific transmitter and receiver structures mainly built upon proteins that are capable of performing the distinct physiological

Diffusive Molecular Communications With Reactive Molecules: Channel Modeling and Signal Design

“…Let L be the length of the channel memory 2 and s ∈ {0, 1} L−1 denote the vector of the L − 1 previously transmitted symbols. We also refer to s as the ISI-causing sequence 3 . Therefore, given s and s, the number of type-i molecules counted at the receiver at sample time t s is modelled as [26], [27]…”

“…Farsad and A. Goldsmith are with the Electrical Engineering Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA (e-mail: nfarsad@stanford.edu; andrea@ee.stanford.edu). nano/micrometer scale dimensions [2], [3]. In nature, a common strategy for communication between nano/microscale entities such as bacteria, cells, and organelles (i.e., components of cells) is diffusive molecular communication (MC) [3], [4].…”

“…nano/micrometer scale dimensions [2], [3]. In nature, a common strategy for communication between nano/microscale entities such as bacteria, cells, and organelles (i.e., components of cells) is diffusive molecular communication (MC) [3], [4]. In contrast to conventional wireless communication systems that encode information into electromagnetic waves, MC systems embed information in the characteristics of signaling molecules such as their type and concentration.…”

“…Theoretically, the memory length of the considered MC channel is infinite; however, from a practical point-of-view, the effect of the previous symbols becomes negligible after several symbol intervals 3. For notational simplicity, we drop the symbol index k in the remainder of the paper.…”

Detection in Molecular Communications with Ligand Receptors under Molecular Interference

“…On the other hand, an increasing research interest is being directed towards receivers with ligand receptors, which chemically interact with information molecules through ligand-receptor binding reaction [17], [18], [19], [20], [21]. This receiver architecture is the most physically relevant, as the ligand-receptor interactions are prevalent in biological systems, and thus suitable for synthetic biology-enabled device architectures [22], [23], [24]. This additional layer of physical interaction, while adding to the complexity of the overall process, yields interesting statistics that can be exploited in order to develop reliable detection methods.…”