Executive Editor's Picks

I am very excited to begin a series of Executive Editor's Picks to be regularly featured in the journal. In each edition, I will select and highlight papers that deserve the attention of our bioelectricity community. Richard Feynman famously said that “we do not truly understand something until we can create one ourselves.” This is equally true for Bioelectrics, and I think an important direction for this field's future is the use of bioelectricity to advance synthetic biology toward synthetic morphology. If we truly understood bioelectric dynamics, we should be able to exploit these circuits for control of growth, form, and behavior in artificial constructs (the way that transcriptional building blocks are being exploited in today's synthetic biology applications). Excellent examples of the key initial steps in this journey, both in terms of tools and computational modeling, are:

• Turing-Like Patterns Can Arise from Purely Bioelectric Mechanisms

• Micah Brodsky

• https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/336461v1

• Geometry-Dependent Arrhythmias in Electrically Excitable Tissues

• Harold M. McNamara, Stephanie Dodson, Yi-Lin Huang, Evan W. Miller, Björn

• Sandstede, Adam E. Cohen

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30292705

• Optically Controlled Oscillators in an Engineered Bioelectric Tissue

• Harold M. McNamara, Hongkang Zhang, Christopher A. Werley, and Adam E. Cohen

• http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.031001

General Introduction to Synthetic Morphology Today Can be Found Here:

• A Review of Morphogenetic Engineering

• René Doursat, Hiroki Sayama, Olivier Michel

• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11047-013-9398-1

• Perspective: The Promise of Multi-Cellular Engineered Living Systems

• Roger D. Kamm, Rashid Bashir, Natasha Arora, Roy D. Dar, Martha U. Gillette, Linda G. Griffith, Melissa L. Kemp, Kathy Kinlaw, Michael Levin, Adam C. Martin, Todd C. McDevitt, Robert M. Nerem, Mark J. Powers, Taher A. Saif, James Sharpe, Shuichi Takayama, Shoji Takeuchi, Ron Weiss, Kaiming Ye, Hannah G. Yevick, and Muhammad H. Zaman

• https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5038337?class=pdf

• Creating Living Cellular Machines

• Roger D. Kamm, Rashid Bashir

• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24006130

• A Morphospace for Synthetic Organs and Organoids: The Possible and the Actual

• Aina Ollé-Vila, Salva Duran-Nebreda, Núria Conde-Pueyo, Raúl Montañez, Ricard Solé

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27032985