Distributed biological computation with multicellular engineered networks

For synthetic biologists' creativity to be unleashed, basic circuits must become truly interchangeable, that is, modular and scalable. This study, one of two linked papers, has harnessed yeast pheromone communication to achieve complex computation through communication between individual cells performing simple logic functions. Such extracellular 'chemical wiring' is one promising way to get around intracellular noise when building more complex genetic circuitry.