Study location	Türkiye, Istanbul
Type	Summer Research Program - Graduate, full-time

Language requirements	English

Other requirements	At least 2 reference(s) must be provided.

Overview

“Molecular Communications (MC) underpins signaling in biological systems, enabling information transfer through biochemical molecules. The prospect of engineering this natural communication mechanism has inspired the emerging Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) framework, which relies on heterogeneous collaborative networks of bio-nano things, such as engineered or artificial biological cells (biotic), as well as artificial micro/nanomachines (abiotic), to enable paradigm-shifting applications, particularly in the healthcare domain, such as intrabody continuous health monitoring.

IoBNT applications, functioning in dynamic biochemical environments with time-varying complexity, such as human body, require adaptability of MC systems akin to biological systems to ensure reliability. However, current research on adaptivity in engineered MC systems is limited to algorithmic or ‘software’ solutions (modulation and detection techniques) and does not extend to the opportunities offered by the flexible and dynamic nature of the physical architectures or ‘hardware’ of the potential MC transceivers.

Natural cells implement various adaptation strategies to optimize information transfer from their environments for maintaining homeostasis in fluctuating conditions.  Many such strategies involve the modulation of signal transduction through dynamic regulation of cell-surface receptors, i.e., ligand receptors, optimizing their sensitivity, dynamic range, and selectivity for time-varying statistics of the environment. The strategies range from regulating receptor cooperativity and allostery to the expression of new receptor types on the cell surface. This flexibility of cell sensory systems has inspired the development of dynamic bio-interfaces, functionalized with biomolecules whose reaction kinetics can be dynamically tuned via external stimuli, such as thermal, and electrical. These interfaces enable various functionalities including on-demand cell adhesion, drug delivery systems, and bioanalysis/bioseparation systems.

The objective of this project is to harness these opportunities by developing adaptive and dynamically reconfigurable biosynthetic receiver architectures that leverage the tunability of ligand-receptor interactions to maintain high detection performance under time-varying MC scenarios.

The project involves the design, modeling and simulation of intracellular stochastic chemical reaction networks that can enable adaptive tuning of ligand-receptor interactions in biosynthetic receivers to optimize MC performance under time-varying environments. Simulations will be carried out in open-source, particle-based, spatial stochastic simulators such as Smoldyn.”