Multicellular control of bacterial populations

Feedback is a key mechanism in biology and synthetic systems, enabling robustness and adaptability. While current synthetic biology controllers use feedback at the single-cell level, this limits complexity due to resource competition and chemical incompatibilities. To address these issues, my research investigated how distributing feedback control across multiple cell populations in a microbial consortium can allow for greater flexibility and scalability.

Related Publications

• Martinelli, V., Fiore, Salzano, D. , & di Bernardo, M. (2025). Root Contours Guided Design of a Multicellular PID Controller. Accepted for presentation at the 33rd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.
• Campanile, G., Martinelli, V., Salzano, D., & Fiore, D. (2025). Regulating population density through antithetic feedback control of cell growth. bioRxiv, 2025-04.
• Campanile, G., Martinelli, V., Salzano, D., Fiore, D., & di Bernardo, M. (2025). In silico analysis of metabolic burden effects on a multicellular integral controller. European Journal of Control, 101322.
• Salzano, D., Shannon, B., Grierson, C., Marucci, L., Savery, N. J., & di Bernardo, M. (2025). In Vivo Multicellular Feedback Control in Synthetic Microbial Consortia. ACS Synthetic Biology.
• Martinelli, V., Fiore, D., Salzano, D., & di Bernardo, M. (2025). Multicellular PID control for robust regulation of biological processes. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 22(222), 20240583.
• Martinelli, V., Salzano, D., Fiore, D., & di Bernardo, M. (2023). Multicellular PD control in microbial consortia. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 7, 2641-2646.
• Martinelli, V., Salzano, D., Fiore, D., & di Bernardo, M. (2022). Multicellular PI control for gene regulation in microbial consortia. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 6, 3373-3378.
• Shannon, B., Zamora-Chimal, C. G., Postiglione, L., Salzano, D., Grierson, C. S., Marucci, L., ... & Di Bernardo, M. (2020). In vivo feedback control of an antithetic molecular-titration motif in escherichia coli using microfluidics. ACS Synthetic Biology, 9(10), 2617-2624.
• Fiore, D., Salzano, D., Cristòbal-Cóppulo, E., Olm, J. M., & di Bernardo, M. (2020). Multicellular feedback control of a genetic toggle-switch in microbial consortia. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 5(1), 151-156.