Recent progress in “artificial” (or “synthetic”) cell research has allowed the construction of sophisticated systems capable of sending/receiving chemical signals to/from biological cells. This new scenario paves the way to conceptually new technologies and scientific investigations based on interfacing organisms (natural cells) and robots (artificial cells) and exploiting their built-in molecular communication capacity. The state-of-the-art is presented and commented from the perspective of Artificial Life and synthetic biology.

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