Design of a multicellular feedback control strategy in a synthetic bacterial consortium

Living organisms employ endogenous negative feedback loops to maintain homeostasis despite environmental fluctuations. An intriguing challenge in Synthetic Biology is that of designing and implementing synthetic circuits to control host cells' behavior, thus mimicking what natural evolution has refined and conserved. The high degree of circuit complexity required to accomplish this task, and the intrinsic modularity of classical control schemes, suggest the implementation of synthetic endogenous feedback loops across more than one cell population. The distribution of the sensing, computation and actuation functions required to achieve regulation, to different cell populations within a consortium allows to reduce the genetic engineering in a particular cell and to increase the robustness as well as the possibility of reusing the synthesized circuits. Here we propose and study, in-silico, the design of a synthetic microbial consortium implementing a feedback controller across two cell populations.