Towards Engineering Biosystems with Emergent Collective Functions

Abstract

<jats:p>Many complex behaviours in biological systems emerge from large populations of interacting molecules or cells, generating functions that go beyond the capabilities of the individual parts. Such collective phenomena are of great interest to bioengineers due to their robustness and scalability. However, engineering emergent collective functions is difficult because they arise as a consequence of complex multi-level feedback, which often spans multiple length-scales. Here, we present a perspective on how some of these challenges could be overcome by using multi-agent modelling as a design framework within synthetic biology. Using case studies covering the construction of synthetic ecologies to biological computation and synthetic cellularity, we show how multi-agent modelling can capture the core features of complex multi-scale systems and provide novel insights into the underlying mechanisms which guide emergent functionalities across scales. The ability to unravel design rules underpinning these behaviours offers a means to take synthetic biology beyond single molecules or cells and towards the creation of systems with functions that can only emerge from collectives at multiple scales.</jats:p>

An open Platform for High-resolution Light-based Control of Microscopic Collectives

“…Self-organisation is used by many biological systems to drive the emergence of robust collective phenomena across large populations of cells, and is known to underpin processes such as tissue morphogenesis, collective motion and disease progression (Gorochowski et al, 2020). Engineering microagents -be they living cells or human-made microrobots -with similarly complex collective behaviours would have applications ranging from the design of new functional materials (Slavkov et al, 2018) to novel biomedical therapies (Alapan et al, 2019;Hauert and Bhatia, 2014).…”

An Open Platform for High‐Resolution Light‐Based Control of Microscopic Collectives

“…Self-organization is used by many biological systems to drive the emergence of robust collective phenomena across large populations of cells and is known to underpin processes such as tissue morphogenesis, collective motion, and disease progression. [1] Engineering microagents-be they living cells or humanmade microrobots-with similarly complex collective behaviors would have applications ranging from the design of new functional materials [2] to novel biomedical therapies. [3,4] The key component driving self-organization is the ability for agents to react to their local environment and follow simple behavioral rules.…”

Seven Challenges in the Multiscale Modelling of Multicellular Tissues

“…This is a natural area in which to apply these modelling techniques, because of the availability of data across multiple spatial and temporal scales -from gene regulatory networks and signalling pathways to cellular interactions and larger-scale morphogen transport processes -and the feedbacks between scales that underlies many emergent processes (Sharpe, 2017). We refer the interested reader to several recent reviews on the use of these modelling approaches in plant biology (Bucksch et al, 2017), cancer biology (Metzcar et al, 2019), synthetic biology (Gorochowski et al, 2020), and tissue engineering (Montes-Olivas et al, 2019).…”