Quorum Sensing in Synthetic Biology: A Review

Abstract In nature, quorum sensing is one of the mechanism bacterial populations use to communicate with their own species or across species to coordinate behaviours. For the last 20 years, synthetic biologists have recognised the remarkable properties of quorum sensing to build genetic circuits responsive to population density. This has led to progress in designing dynamic, coordinated and sometimes multi-cellular systems for bio-production in metabolic engineering and for increased spatial and temporal complexity in synthetic biology. In this review, we highlight recent works focused on using quorum sensing to engineer cell-cell behaviour.