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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Nov 1.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Mater. 2014 Mar 23;13(5):515–523. doi: 10.1038/nmat3912

Figure 3. Synthetic cellular communication for dynamic, autonomous material production and patterning.

Figure 3

a, Synthetic gene circuits that couple curli subunit secretion to external inducer signals, when combined with synthetic cellular communication circuits, allow for the production of materials whose structure and composition changes autonomously with time. AHLSender+aTcReceiver/CsgA secreted both CsgA and AHL. As AHL signal accumulated, AHLReceiver/CsgAHis secreted increasing levels of CsgAHis. b, Using the autonomous cellular communication system, the length of CsgAHis blocks and the proportion of CsgAHis increased with time (plot of the proportion of fibril length labelled by NiNTA-AuNP, grey lines). This behaviour could be tuned by the ratio of the seeding density of AHLSender+aTcReceiver/CsgA cells to AHLReceiver/CsgAHis cells. When only AHLSender+aTcReceiver/CsgA cells were present, the resulting fibrils were almost uniformly unlabelled; when only AHLReceiver/CsgAHis cells were present, no curli fibrils were formed (Controls). Detailed histograms can be found in Supplementary Fig. 10. Scale bars are 200nm.