Engineering bacterial populations for pattern formation

The automated design of synthetic biological circuits is an active area of research. A particularly promising area of research is the engineering of populations of communicating bacteria, in order to produce behaviour more complex than is possible with the engineering of individual bacteria. We present a computational approach to the engineering of communicating bacterial populations, using a multi-level approach. Circuits are designed using an evolutionary algorithm, at a high level of abstraction, with an agent-based model. Evolved agents can then be mapped onto previously-defined, lower-level components such as Standard Virtual Parts. This approach is applied to the evolution of a two-dimensional pattern, the French Flag.