【转帖】Nature：转基因酵母细胞制造出能互相交流的“生物电路”

该研究团队使用酵母细胞制造出了合成电路，细胞之间可通过基因调控进行连接。他们对这些酵母细胞进行了基因修改，使它们能够基于设定的标准来感应周遭环境，并通过分泌出分子向其它酵母细胞发送信号。因此，这些不同的细胞能像乐高玩具的积木块一样连接在一起，产生更复杂的电路。与使用一种转基因酵母细胞制成的结构相比，这种由不同转基因酵母细胞组成的结构能完成更复杂的“电子功能”。
Nature doi:10.1038/nature09679

Distributed biological computation with multicellular engineered networks

Sergi Regot,Javier Macia,Núria Conde,Kentaro Furukawa,Jimmy Kjellén,Tom Peeters,Stefan Hohmann,Eulàlia de Nadal,Francesc Posas Ricard Solé

Ongoing efforts within synthetic and systems biology have been directed towards the building of artificial computational devices1 using engineered biological units as basic building blocks2, 3. Such efforts, inspired in the standard design of electronic circuits4, 5, 6, 7, are limited by the difficulties arising from wiring the basic computational units (logic gates) through the appropriate connections, each one to be implemented by a different molecule. Here, we show that there is a logically different form of implementing complex Boolean logic computations that reduces wiring constraints thanks to a redundant distribution of the desired output among engineered cells. A practical implementation is presented using a library of engineered yeast cells, which can be combined in multiple ways. Each construct defines a logic function and combining cells and their connections allow building more complex synthetic devices. As a proof of principle, we have implemented many logic functions by using just a few engineered cells. Of note, small modifications and combination of those cells allowed for implementing more complex circuits such as a multiplexer or a 1-bit adder with carry, showing the great potential for re-utilization of small parts of the circuit. Our results support the approach of using cellular consortia as an efficient way of engineering complex tasks not easily solvable using single-cell implementations.

好资料，谢谢楼主的分享。