Synthetic Morphogenesis Self-constructing living architectures by design

This talk will focus on advances in synthetic morphogenesis: reprogramming the morphogenetic code in biological cells to steer multicellular self-construction toward a target morphology by design. The traditional approach to synthetic morphogenesis relies on the exogenous insertion of genetic circuits that encode the final architecture of interest. Hence, the morphological and behavioral complexity of the synthetic constructs has been bounded by the restrictions imposed by circuit size and delivery methods. As a result, the development of autonomous, large-scale, and rapid construction of living structures with radical synthetic morphologies and functions has been limited. To offer an alternative and complementary approach, in this talk, a novel method leveraging the inherent anatomical plasticity of adult tissues for triggering synthetic morphogenesis without direct genetic manipulation will be introduced. In this approach, a set of priori-designed non-default developmental inputs are provided to the wild-type chassis (e.g., NHBEs) to guide the biological system towards self-construction into the target design (e.g., ciliated spheroid). To illustrate this approach, the case study of Anthrobots (Gumuskaya et al., 2024), the first human-derived self-constructing living “biobots,” will be presented.