Date: 14th Oct 2026. 13:00

Place: Department Library

Abstract: Self-organization is a fundamental mechanism by which complex biological structures and dynamics emerge from interactions between simple components. Synthetic biological systems provide a powerful framework for investigating these phenomena, from intracellular oscillations to multicellular spatial organization. Coupled genetic oscillators can generate complex dynamics such as synchronization, resonance, period doubling and chaos, while their spatial organization can give rise to collective patterns. In microbial communities, interactions between populations can generate Turing patterns through the coupling of cellular growth and rapidly diffusing metabolites, producing structures such as stripes, rings, dots and labyrinths. In the absence of metabolic cross-feeding, bacterial motility can instead drive spatial organization into programmable Voronoi patterns, including complex structures in three dimensions. These systems demonstrate how nonlinear dynamics, intercellular interactions and spatial transport can be combined to understand and engineer self-organized structures in biological systems.