Synthetic multicellular cell-to-cell communication in inkjet printed bacterial cell systems

Abstract We utilized a commercially available materials printer to investigate synthetic multicellular cell-to-cell communication because inkjet printing technology makes it easy to print spatiotemporal patterns of soluble biomolecules and live cells. Since cells are genetically programmed to communicate with one another via synthetic biology, cell signaling molecules secreted by one cell microcolony can induce two neighboring cell microcolonies to respond by expressing or stopping the expression of fluorescent protein genes. In this work, we not only characterize the printing parameters such as the initial seeding numbers, spacing distances, microcolony sizes, printing timings, and printed patterns of cells but also demonstrate that the use of the proposed printing technology can provide a useful means for many synthetic biologists to simplify and speed up the investigation of cell-to-cell communication between synthetic bacterial cells.