Addressing by concentrations of receptor saturation in bacterial communication

Abstract

Engineering of molecular and nano-scale communication networks may benefit future applications which interact with biological systems. Molecular communication networks are composed of bionanomachines which can interact with biomolecules or cells through transmission of molecules. One promising approach for generic communications is directional transport of molecules, such as by bacteria, to transmit molecules to another bionanomachine at a specific spatial location in an environment. In this paper, bacteria move to spatial locations relative to molecular beacons. Each molecular beacon emits a different type of molecule to produce a concentration gradient. A bacterium has a chemotactic pathway tuned for estimating its direction relative to the concentration gradients, and the specific concentrations at which the chemotactic pathway saturate represents a specific spatial address. Through simulation modeling, receptor parameters of bacteria were tuned to target various spatial addresses, and the latency and success rate of communication were characterized for receivers positioned at each spatial address.