Tile patterns can be found throughout the natural world, from honeycomb to fish scales. But now researchers have come up with a new way to create patterns in petri dishes – using bacteria. By engineering bacterial cells to express unique adhesive proteins on their surface, the team could create linear patterns – formed as colonies of cells stuck together as they grow. What’s more, by changing the exact proteins expressed and modeling where to place the bacterial cells, they were able to control the resulting geometry – creating a set of complex patterns
Research work: 4-bit adhesion logic enables universal multi-cell interface modeling
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