Addressable, \"Packet-Based\" Intercellular Communication through Plasmid Conjugation

We develop a system for implementing \"packet-based\" intercellular communication in an engineered bacterial population via conjugation. Our system uses gRNA-based identification markers that allow messages to be addressed to specific strains via Cas9-mediated cleavage of messages sent to the wrong recipient, which we show reduces plasmid transfer by four orders of magnitude. Integrase-mediated editing of the address on the message plasmid allows cells to dynamically update the messages recipients in vivo. As a proof-of-concept demonstration of our system, we propose a linear path scheme that would propagate a message sequentially through the strains of a population in a defined order.