Synthetic tissue engineering: Programming multicellular self-organization by designing customized cell-cell communication

摘要

Recent advances in synthetic biology allow us to create artificial genetic programs that encode customized cell-cell communication in mammalian systems. Using this technology, we can design and test what kind of cell-cell communication can drive self-organization of cells into complex tissue structures. Our results show the flexibility and power of the modular synthetic system to program the formation of various multicellular structures. Such synthetic biology efforts on multicellular self-organization will improve our understanding of design principles of tissue development and provide new capabilities to engineer complex tissues and organoids with desired shapes and functions.