15 NSFBIO: Excitocell: A rewired eukaryotic cell model for the analysis and design of cellular morphogenesis

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Excitable dynamics is a fundamental example of an emergent behavior in complexsystems, which, although observed and studied by various branches of science and engineering,has received little attention in biology outside the context of the nervous system. The excitabledynamics discovered by the PIs represents a readily quantifiable cortical pattern-formingbehavior that is potentially controlled by a compact molecular module, and thus amenable tointegrated mathematical and experimental study.The PIs propose a novel synthetic biology approach to reconstitute cortical excitabilityin simplified rewired cells and in an ex vivo system with a high level of experimental control.Adopting this systems and synthetic biology approach, in contrast to top-down genetic analysis,is intended to produce an experimentally-validated model of the core physiological module.