Multicellular control of bacterial populations

Distributing feedback control across cell populations to build scalable and robust synthetic consortia.

Multicellular PID Cybergenetics Multicellular consortia

Multicellular control of bacterial populations

Feedback is central to biological regulation and engineered systems. Single-cell feedback controllers are powerful but face limitations due to resource competition and chemical crosstalk. My research develops strategies to distribute control across multiple interacting populations — enabling cooperative controllers that scale and are more robust in practice.

Related Publications

Martinelli, V., Fiore, Salzano, D., & di Bernardo, M.
Root Contours Guided Design of a Multicellular PID Controller. 33rd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED), 2025.
Campanile, G., Martinelli, V., Salzano, D., Fiore, D., & di Bernardo, M.
In silico analysis of metabolic burden effects on a multicellular integral controller. European Journal of Control (2025).
Salzano, D., Shannon, B., Grierson, C., Marucci, L., Savery, N. J., & di Bernardo, M.
In Vivo Multicellular Feedback Control in Synthetic Microbial Consortia. ACS Synthetic Biology (2025).
Martinelli, V., Fiore, D., Salzano, D., & di Bernardo, M.
Multicellular PID control for robust regulation of biological processes. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 22(222), 20240583 (2025).
Martinelli, V., Salzano, D., Fiore, D., & di Bernardo, M.
Multicellular PD control in microbial consortia. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 7, 2641-2646 (2023).
Martinelli, V., Salzano, D., Fiore, D., & di Bernardo, M.
Multicellular PI control for gene regulation in microbial consortia. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 6, 3373-3378 (2022).
Shannon, B., Zamora-Chimal, C. G., Postiglione, L., Salzano, D., Grierson, C. S., Marucci, L., ... & Di Bernardo, M.
In vivo feedback control of an antithetic molecular-titration motif in Escherichia coli using microfluidics. ACS Synthetic Biology, 9(10), 2617-2624 (2020).
Fiore, D., Salzano, D., Cristòbal-Cóppulo, E., Olm, J. M., & di Bernardo, M.
Multicellular feedback control of a genetic toggle-switch in microbial consortia. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 5(1), 151-156 (2020).