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.

The “synthetic method” is the methodological approach that guides current scientific attempts of understanding natural processes by the construction of hardware, software, and/or wetware models from scracth. It focuses the scientific inquiry on the generative mechanisms of the target processes, with the goal of testing and improving scientific hypotheses about them. This article presents an application of the synthetic method based on cutting-edge technology: the construction of “synthetic cells” (also known as “artificial cells”) capable of exchanging chemical signals (and, in this sense, of ‘communicating’) with biological cells.