Molecular Communication
Communication plays a crucial role in our lives – from the daily interactions we have with people to the molecular connections of our cells that keep us alive.
As new technology emerges in medicine and computing, it has become ever more important to understand and make sure that genetically engineered cells, or nanomachines, are able to communicate.
This engineered biological communication is the budding field of molecular communication.
Computer science professor Tatsuya Suda and his students are exploring the possibility of molecular communication as a solution for sharing information between biological nanomachines such as motor proteins, ATPases and bacterium.
Suda’s research explores how cells compute information and share them with other biological (cells) and biologically derived nanomachines, or molecular sensors.
Nanomachines perform computation and senses its environment. Molecular communication provides a mechanism for these nanomachines to communicate over a short distance using molecules as a communication carrier.
Suda and his research team are focusing on understanding these biological nanomachines and on artificially creating counterparts of biological nanomachines.
“Communication provides a means by which nanomachines perform coordinated tasks that cannot be accomplished by a single anomachine,” says Suda. “For example, medical nanomachines with communication capabilities may perform coordinated monitoring of human health.”
So what is the ultimate goal of this molecular communications research?
Suda hopes to design and engineer molecular-scale information processing and communication systems by understanding cellular behaviors including cell-to-cell communications.
In particular, his research group hopes to control calcium signaling which is universally used to modulate cellular behaviors, such as growth and death, in many types of cells.
