Figure 6.

Developmental bioelectricity

(A) Neurons maintain a resting potential via ion channels in their membranes and propagate their electric state to neighbors via gap junctions (electrical synapses).

(B and C) (B) Bioelectric signaling using these same molecular components is a property of all cells, which join together into tissues forming networks (C) that enable large-scale electrically mediated computations to regulate distributions of morphogens and control gene expression.

(D) Fluorescent voltage dye image showing an example of an instructive bioelectric prepattern—the frog embryo face, showing the future locations of the eye, mouth, and other organs (taken with permission from(Vandenberg et al., 2011)).

(E–G) (E) A variety of channel, connexin, and neurotransmitter machinery proteins are available as a parts library, complementing canonical transcriptional modules, which enables synthetic biologists to build bioelectric circuits for control of tissue-level morphogenesis. An example of the plasticity of self-assembly beyond genetic default outcomes are shown in planaria, where normal cells can build wild-type forms (F) or highly altered morphologies (G) if the bioelectric circuit states are modified.