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I will share my vision that microbiological systems should be as programmable, interactive, accessible, constructible, and useful as our personal electronic devices. Natural multi-cellular organisms and symbiotic systems achieve complex tasks through division of labor among cells. Such systems transcend current electronics and robotics in many ways, e.g., they synthesize chemicals, generate active physical forms, and self-replicate. Harnessing these features promises significant impact for manufacturing (bioelectronics / smart materials /swarm robotics), health (tissue engineering), chemistry (pathway modularization), ecology (bioremediation), biodesign (art), and more. My lab takes a synergistic bottom-up / top-down approach to achieve such transformative applications: (1) We utilize synthetic biology and biophysics approaches to engineer and understand multi-cell bacterial assemblies. We developed the first synthetic cell-cell adhesion toolbox [1] and optogenetic cell-surface adhesion toolbox (‘Biofilm Lithography’) [2]. Integration with standard synthetic biology components (e.g., for signaling, differentiation, logic) now enables a new intelligent materials paradigm that rests on versatile, modular, and composable smart particles (i.e., cells). (2) We pioneered ‘Interactive Biotechnology’ that enables humans to directly interact with living multi-cell assemblies in real-time. I will provide the rational for this interactivity, demonstrate multiple applications using phototactic Euglena cells (e.g., tangible museum exhibits [3], biology cloud experimentation labs [4], biotic video games [5]), and show how this technology aided the discovery of new microswimmer phototaxis control strategies [6]. Finally, I discuss architecture and swarm programming languages for future bio-electronic devices (i.e., ‘Biotic Processing Units’ – BPUs) [7,8]. REFs: [1] Glass, Cell ’18; [2] Jin, PNAS ’18; [3] Lee, CHI ACM ’15; [4] Hossain, Nature Biotech ‘16; [5] Cira, PLoS Biology ‘15; [6] Tsang, Nature Physics ’18; [7] Lam LOC ‘17; [8] Washington, PNAS ‘19.
Ingmar H. Riedel-Kruse (Stanford University)
Assistant Professor of Bioengineering
Ingmar H. Riedel-Kruse is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and Biophysics at Stanford University. His research seeks to make it easier to engineer and program multicellular biological systems, circuits and devices in order to foster the human condition. His interdisciplinary lab integrates diverse areas like synthetic biology, biophysics, human-computer interaction design, embedded cyber-physical systems, modeling, education, and games. He received his Diploma in theoretical physics at the Technical University Dresden, his PhD in experimental biophysics at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, followed by a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology.