Coordinated Spatial Pattern Formation in Biomolecular Communication Networks

This paper proposes a control theoretic framework to model and analyze the self-organized pattern formation of molecular concentrations in biomolecular communication networks, emerging applications in synthetic biology. In biomolecular communication networks, bionanomachines, or biological cells, communicate with each other using a cell-to-cell communication mechanism mediated by a diffusible signaling molecule, thereby the dynamics of molecular concentrations are approximately modeled as a reaction–diffusion system with a single diffuser. We first introduce a feedback model representation of the reaction–diffusion system and provide a systematic local stability/instability analysis tool using the root locus of the feedback system. The instability analysis then allows us to analytically derive the conditions for the self-organized spatial pattern formation, or Turing pattern formation, of the bionanomachines. We propose a novel synthetic biocircuit motif called activator–repressor–diffuser system and show that it is one of the minimum biomolecular circuits that admit self-organized patterns over cell population.