Communication

Our project is on Metabolic Wiring - an efficient means of connecting separate cells and communicating between them. In a social system, such as the iGEM team, the metabolic wires are represented by various channels of communication. Therefore, we asked the teams about the means they used to transfer knowledge and information in the team.

• It was generally agreed by all teams that it was important to know to at least some extent what was going on in all parts of the project. There is a definite need for 'wires' between sub-groups.
  We avoid miscommunication by making information available to everyone, so that everyone knows what's happening.
  The sub-groups in our team are very disconnected and don't work together, which isn't good, and our work suffers from it.
• It was a common view among the teams that the most efficient way of achieving sufficient distribution of knowledge in the team is regular communication. - The 'wires' - connections between sub-groups - need to be regularly placed.
  We try to keep everyone in the loop, so we have a short briefing every morning and a major debriefing once a week.
• Means of communication: It became apparent that the teams mostly used online tools like (Facebook, Google drive etc) to keep each other up to date and pool the data. This links back to the distributed cognition concepts introduced earlier. Another team used whiteboards in communal areas to communicate results. ‘External’ tools may be used to communicate information.
• Cost of communication was also a recurrent theme in the conversations. Several team members acknowledged that, if the meetings were too frequent or too long, or too detailed, it interfered with their individual work, in terms of time and effort involved. Besides, it wasn't always that useful to individual work, especially if the sub-groups were highly specialised and didn't share any knowledge/tasks with others.
• It was also repeatedly stated that communication helped with troubleshooting and any issues in the team -- these would get solved faster/better if properly communicated.

Relevance for bacterial system design

Keller and Surette (2006) define that communication only occurs if (1) one or multiple individuals produce a signal and (2) it is picked up by perceivers who subsequently alter their phenotype in response to this signal. Like many other things, communication is subject to natural selection. It is only maintained throughout evolution if both partners benefit from communicating.

This is an important consideration to be made for our system. In fact, we need to ensure that the metabolic cost implicated in communicating does not outweigh the overall benefit of the population. We might want to consider if it is a good idea reduce the communicative output to well defined times/concentrations, similarly to the reduction of the number of meetings during the iGEM project.

Keller and Surette (2006). Communication in bacteria: an ecological and evolutionary perspective. Nature Reviews Microbiology 4: 249-258.