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Engineering Biology in Cambridge

 
New paper out now! Programmed hierarchical patterning of bacterial populations

First author Christian Boehm, who earned his PhD in the Haseloff Lab and is the founder of the European Association of Synthetic Biology Students and Postdocs, reflects on the significance of this latest publication.

"Synthetic biologists have made substantial progress in engineering the behaviour of individual cells. However, a variety of future applications in bioprocessing, remediation, and regenerative medicine challenges us to exert control over cohorts of cells to generate specialised structures and organs for production and storage of compounds of interest. In nature, self-organisation in multicellular organisms is shaped by hierarchical induction of gene expression domains. Our work demonstrates how such processes can be emulated using a rationally designed synthetic genetic circuit, opening a door to a higher level of control over multicellular behaviour."

Read the full paper >>> 

ChristianBoehm

Boehm, C. R., Grant, P. K., & Haseloff, J. (2017). Programmed hierarchical patterning of bacterial populations. bioRxiv, (2018), 204925. https://doi.org/10.1101/204925