Future work

We won't be satisfied with only achieving the coupling between a bacterium oscillator with a computer simulation. Next step, we will focus on the coupling between a metabolic system such as Krebs Cycle (Fig.1, from the Internet) and its computer simulation (Fig.2, from the Internet). We are interested in cell differentiation (Fig.3, from the Internet). If we could achieve the coupling between cell differentiation and computer simulation, we will get a new organism that is half-real and half virtual, leading to larger diversities of life forms.

We chose to couple oscillators because the synchronization is easy to observe. Not only oscillations but also many other biological processes could be coupled. In fact, the core are the real-time communication (between the real and virtual parts) and co-determination of the system behavior in the coupled state of the mixed-reality system. Life has strong coupling within itself and with the environment; that’s why we need to decouple parts in synthetic biology. In our project, we not only plan to achieve coupling between a bacterium and a computer but also dream to achieve coupling between a bio-system with everything. We will try to couple different kinds of organisms with different kinds of computers. We also plan to test the cascades of the couples. Finally, it may fuse the organisms, inorganic environments and their virtual counterparts into one system, boosting the biological research into a new stage: synergetic biology, where bidirectional synchronization and coupling between the real biological processes and the virtual simulation processes (implemented as the computing processes in the real world) are fundamental.