The application of physics and engineering principles to the study of living systems is as old as physics itself. What is unprecedented is the range of technical developments that has expanded our possibilities of analysis and manipulation to a degree that was unimaginable 50 years ago. On one side, digital microscopies, fast image processing, micro-fabrication, and micro-manipulation allow tracking of large numbers of cells while actively and precisely shaping the physical world around them. On the other side, molecular biology is constantly providing new tools to edit and reshape the genetic landscape inside cells. In this background, two emerging research fields have seen an explosion of interest in the last twenty years: active matter and synthetic biology.
Active matter is made of active “atoms”, synthetic or biological units that are capable of generating systematic motion using energy that is stored internally or in the local environment. The inherent activity of these systems keeps them away from thermal equilibrium where rectification, self-assembly, flocking and other phenomena of spontaneous organization can be observed. Besides the fundamental questions posed by this new phenomenology, active matter can be thought of as a reservoir of mechanical energy which can be controlled and directed into systematic coherent motions to carry out actuation and transport tasks inside micro-devices. In this respect, while synthetic micro-swimmers may look strikingly similar to swimming bacteria seen from the outside, moving inside a cell, the stable and uniform arrangement of atoms in synthetic microswimmers is replaced by a dynamic orchestra of thousands of biological machines executing a software program written in DNA. After 50 years of extraordinary advances in genetics and molecular biology, we can now read that code, edit it and also write new code from scratch. DNA “cut and paste” has become an indispensable life science tool, but until 20 years ago, also a very technically demanding skill to acquire. Synthetic biology emerged from computer scientists’ desire to apply the principles of engineering and computer science to biology. It aims at building a catalog of modular genetic parts which are reliable, optimized and interchangeable. From a cultural perspective, Synthetic Biology provides a conceptual framework that promotes and facilitates multidisciplinary approaches to biology.
The SYGMA project revolves around the central idea that synthetic biology represents a disruptive technology in the field of active matter. Cells are being reprogrammed to degrade pollutants or to produce drugs, biofuels, and plastics. But there is a hidden potential in synthetic biology that has not been recognized yet: cells can be engineered to execute mechanical tasks, such as actuators in micro machines, or programmable active agents in a new generation of soft materials characterized by dynamical properties that would be inconceivable without biological components. In brief, the aim of the SYGMA project is twofold:
- to provide the building blocks of a light controllable active matter with reliable, reconfigurable and interactively tunable dynamical properties
- to exploit this new generation of active particles to expand our understanding and control of the non-equilibrium dynamics of active microsystems.
