Biology

Dr. Sheref Mansy
Centre for Integrative Biology, University of Trento, Italy

One difficulty in attempting to construct artificial cells is an inability to quantify how close the assembled artificial cells are to natural cellular life. To circumvent this problem, we constructed artificial cells that can chemically communicate with natural bacteria, including V. fischeri, V. harveyi, E. coli, and P. aeruginosa. Although sending chemical messages to each of these bacteria was possible, only the sensing mechanism for V. fischeri was functional in vitro. The response of V. fischeri to two-way chemical communication with artificial cells was then compared to communication with natural V. fischeri in order to determine how life-like the artificial cells were. Artificial cells were also built to either mediate communication between organisms that do not normally communicate with each other or interfere in normal communication paths. Such artificial cells could, in the future, be harnessed to control complex mixtures of bacterial populations.