Molecular Communication Approaches for Wetware Artificial Life: A Workshop Report

On 25 July 2023, a workshop entitled “Molecular Communication Approaches for Wetware Artificial Life” took place as a satellite event at the international conference ALIFE 2023 (The 2023 Conference on Artificial Life). In this report, we comment on the workshop by focusing on the main theme and the motivations that led us to develop this initiative. In particular, we highlight how recent progress in synthetic biology and in the study of molecular communication from an engineering perspective can be fruitfully joined to provide a powerful platform to develop frontier research lines in “wetware” Artificial Life. The talks presented at the workshop are briefly summarized. This report is, ultimately, an opportunity to promote an emerging field that calls for collaborative efforts of scholars from multiple disciplines, from chemistry to molecular biology, from communication engineering to nanotechnology, and up to those interested in more theoretical aspects about complex artificial systems that mimic natural ones.