As part of Lucia Marucci's Inaugural Lecture celebrations we are delighted to welcome Diego di Bernardo back to the University of Bristol, and As part of Lucia Marucci's Inaugural Lecture celebrations we are delighted to welcome Diego di Bernardo back to the University of Bristol and Mario di Bernardo via Teams to deliver workshops on Cybergenetics - an adventure which they set upon with Lucia more than a decade ago.

These workshops promise to be extremely popular, so please secure your place by registering here on Eventbrite.

In addition, please join us for Lucia's Inaugural Lecture from 3-4pm, followed by a drinks reception. You can register for this event here: Lucia Marucci's Inaugural Lecture Registration

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“Cybergenetics: Steering Life with Engineering Precision.”.

Prof. Diego di Bernardo

Genomic Medicine Program Coordinator, Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM), Naples, Italy; Full Professor in BioEngineering; Dept. of Chemical, Materials and Industrial Engineering, University of Naples "Federico II, Italy.

“Engineering biology for medicine”

Synthetic Biology aims to rationally engineer living systems, yet traditional empirical approaches often fall short due to biological variability and unpredicted non-linearity. Integrating methodologies from Control Engineering in Synthetic Biology offers a transformative path forward by enabling the design and implementation of “gene circuits” to precisely control biological processes in mammalian cells. This approach allows dynamic regulation of biological outputs, such as protein levels, based on continuous sensing and correction. By bridging these disciplines, we are laying the groundwork to solve current bottlenecks that prevent current gene therapy approaches to reach more patients. I will present a range of applications currently being developed in my lab that range from improving the robustness of cell factories for the production of therapeutic viral vectors to enhancing the precision of gene therapies.

Prof. Mario di Bernardo

Professor of Nonlinear Systems and Control; Department of Electrical Engineering and ICT; University of Naples Federico II, Italy.

“Multicellular feedback control of microbial consortia”

Synthetic microbial consortia have emerged as a powerful platform for complex biological tasks, from the production of valuable chemicals to therapeutic applications. However, ensuring reliable function of these consortia remains challenging due to population imbalances, metabolic competition, and inherent cell-to-cell variability. While feedback control has been extensively used in synthetic biology to achieve robust operation of engineered genetic circuits, most implementations are confined to single cells, limiting their complexity and adaptability. In this talk, I will present recent advances in the development and implementation of distributed feedback control strategies that overcome these limitations by distributing control functions across multiple populations in synthetic microbial consortia. Starting from theoretical foundations, I will discuss how the realization of reliable multicellular control architectures requires solving key challenges at the interface of control theory, synthetic biology, and machine learning. I will focus on three complementary approaches we have recently developed:

(1) A multicellular feedback control architecture using orthogonal quorum sensing molecules to enable stable and precise regulation of gene expression across populations, even amid variations in consortium composition;

(2) A dual-chamber bioreactor system with switching feedback control to maintain desired ratios between different bacterial populations;

(3) A learning-based control strategy combining sim-to-real transfer learning with simple growth models to regulate population density in bioreactors.

Throughout the talk, I will emphasize how these distributed control strategies help overcome key limitations of single-cell controllers, such as metabolic burden and chemical incompatibilities, while enhancing robustness and modularity. The approaches I will present lay important groundwork for engineering more complex and reliable multicellular systems with applications ranging from biomanufacturing to therapeutic bacteria.

Cybergenetics workshops (Lucia Marucci's Inaugural Lecture series)