05. Vittoria Martinelli: Multicellular PID Control of Gene Expression in Microbial Consortia

Abstract. Several implementations of biomolecular PID controllers have been proposed in the past years. However, most of these solutions require embedding the control logic within the same cell hosting the process. This could cause excessive metabolic burden, as well as a lack of modularity, limiting the applicability of the developed controllers. To overcome these problems, we propose a multicellular implementation of a biomolecular PID controller, in which the proportional, integral and derivative actions are each implemented in a different population within a microbial consortium. These populations are interfaced using quorum sensing molecules with a target population hosting the process that needs to be controlled. We derive analytical conditions to guide the design of a consortium with specific transient and static performance using the root contours method and we numerically validate the performance and robustness of the proposed multicellular control strategy via extensive in-silico experiments in BSim, a realistic agent-based simulator of bacterial populations.
Bio. Vittoria Martinelli graduated in Biomedical Engineering and is currently a Ph.D. student in Information and Communication Technology for Health (ICTH) at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (DIETI), University of Naples Federico II. Her research focuses on Synthetic Biology and the main topic is the development of multicellular control strategies for cell populations. She has designed and validated through computational methods various multicellular control strategies for gene regulation in microbial consortia.