Biological systems employ compartmentalization and other co-localization strategies in order to orchestrate a multitude of biochemical processes by simultaneously enabling “data hiding” and modularization. This article presents recent research that embraces compartmentalization and co-location as an organizational programmatic principle in synthetic biological and biomimetic systems. In these systems, artificial vesicles and synthetic minimal cells are envisioned as nanoscale reactors for programmable biochemical synthesis and as chassis for molecular information processing. We present P systems, brane calculi, and the recently developed chemtainer calculus as formal frameworks providing data hiding and modularization and thus enabling the representation of highly complicated hierarchically organized compartmentalized reaction systems. We demonstrate how compartmentalization can greatly reduce the complexity required to implement computational functionality, and how addressable compartments permit the scaling-up of programmable chemical synthesis.

This paper presents the design and control of an actuated bivalve robot, which has been developed to study the burrowing locomotion of bivalves in sediment. The setup consists of a tank filled with sand and water, plastic models of bivalve shells capable of expelling water and an external actuation mechanism simulating the rocking burrowing motion typically used by these animals. The realistic shell shapes have been realized using three-dimensional plotting techniques allowing testing influences of different shell shapes and surface structures (sculptures) on the burrowing efficiency. Based on the experimental setup, the burrowing process has been reproduced. The results show that this setup can be used to identify correlations in the burrowing process. Further experimental work will investigate the influence of factors such as shell shape and sculpture or the motion sequence on the burrowing performance.