CIF: Small: WetComm:Foundations of Wet Communication Theory

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The goal of this project is to develop transformative concepts and tools to characterize, model, and design systems based on living communicating devices, i.e., biological cells, to control the propagation of information in biological environments. This information is at the basis of how cells communicate in nature, and it is fundamental to their basic activities, such as growth and reproduction, and their coordination with other cells and the environment in which they live. More broadly, the way this information propagates impacts human health, our environment, food and energy resources, and others, and its engineered control would enable a plethora of game-changing applications. While the discipline of synthetic biology provides tools to experimentally demonstrate the capabilities of engineered biological cells, there currently lacks a unified and coherent theoretical framework to specifically develop and optimize their communications. Current communication theory tools fall short in capturing some important peculiarities of biological communication systems that live, grow, and reproduce. This project seeks to address these limitations by re-thinking communication theory in light of these peculiarities and their impact on how information is quantified, processed, and exchanged by engineered biological cells.This project will pursue the aforementioned research direction by: i) defining novel information-theoretic metrics to address not only the cell-to-cell information exchange through molecular processes, but also the correlation of these mechanisms with the way cells harvest, store, and utilize energy to grow and replicate; ii) exploring the application of communication engineering methods to optimize communications according to these novel metrics by designing system components based on systems and synthetic biology, such as chemical reactions, molecule transport, and DNA-based biological circuits, for information source and channel coding; iii) incorporating a forward-engineering approach based on the novel metrics and communication engineering methods within standard practices in synthetic biology to optimize, design, model, and manufacture biological circuits ready to be implemented in biological cell systems. These research activities will pave the way for a novel interdisciplinary branch in communication theory and engineering, where communication systems are developed based on tools from systems and synthetic biology in place of classical electronics. Moreover, this project is expected to contribute to the growing field of synthetic biology with an information-centric approach to the design and optimization of genetically engineered cells. Research and education will involve undergraduate and graduate students with interdisciplinary background, increase the participation of middle-high school students, and in particular inspire women, historically underrepresented in communication engineering but representing more than half of the majors in biology, to embrace this interdisciplinary field.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.