The ability of self-organizing systems to display emergent, adaptive capabilities is a fundamental feature of biological life. Understanding the mechanisms by which cells co-ordinate at the micro-scale to produce macro-scale structures and behaviors is a fundamental problem in developmental biology. Moreover, it is an important goal of biomedicine to identify triggers that re-wire the physiological patterns of information flow and control signals. Here, we use a recently developed, synthetic biology platform known as basal Xenobots to explore how patterns of information flow and multi-cellular integration are regulated by chemical signaling pathways. Basal Xenobots are modified, organoid-like systems constructed from embryos, and have previously been shown to display complex patterns of information flows. In this study, we recorded calcium signals before and after exposing basal Xenobots to extra-cellular adenosine triphosphate (eATP), and used statistics from multivariate information theory to explore the differences in global patterns of information flow across the cells in each state. We found that eATP resulted in a dramatic reconfiguration of global information processing dynamics, characterized by a global decrease in multi-cellular co-ordination, reduced information transfer and integration, and a decrease in the global entropy rate of the basal Xenobots. These results provide evidence that purinergic signaling may play a key role in the regulation of multi-cellular self-organization, with implications for a variety of clinical disorders thought to involve aberrant purinergic signaling. These results also suggest the possibility that bioengineers may be able to ``tune" the degree of self-organizing capacity in living systems via pharmacological intervention.
Varley, T. F., Pai, V., Levin, M., Bongard, J.
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