HOUSTON, July 20 (Xinhua) -- Researchers from two U.S. universities are working to find out how cells communicate to coordinate their actions, according to a news release published on Thursday by Rice University in Texas.
Rice University synthetic biologist Matthew Bennett and University of Houston mathematician Kresimir Josic are looking into the large-scale dynamics of synthetic microbial consortia to see how they connect.
Synthetic microbes are cells in which DNA is modified to carry out a task, like producing a protein on demand or signaling the presence of a target molecule or cell.
The researchers hope to gain insight into how to modify cells -- or build them from the ground up -- to carry out programmed tasks like advancing the production of biofuels or chemicals or adjusting a person's gut microbiome with a synthetic probiotic, according to the news release.
Bennett and Josic have received combined National Science Foundation grants worth more than 1.5 million U.S. dollars to build a framework that describes how cells in large colonies of bacteria communicate with each other and act in concert.
The researchers also plan to model systems in which cells work best together with their own kind and manage to ignore the signaling cacophony around them.
One challenge to their work is the vast differences in size between the phenomena that generate large-scale multicellular structures and those structures themselves.
