Intercellular Communications

As mentioned in Section 4.3.9, a cell which is a member of a multicellular organism can communicate with other cells in the organism by sending regulators from its Promoter Store and Repressor Store (using the reg_transport instruction). In this way, the execution of code in a particular cell may be influenced by many other cells in the organism, because regulators which are sent from one cell to another will influence which sections of code get executed in both cells. Therefore, although each cell in a multicellular organism has the same genome (assuming there are no somatic mutations), each cell may be executing different parts of this genome at any given time.

As a cell within a multicellular organism can only exchange regulators and energy tokens with its immediate neighbours, organisms adopting different shapes will have different capacities for internal communication and regulation. Within an organism, cells can also actively switch neighbourhoods by migrating to a different position (using the migrate instruction). If multicellular organisms do evolve in any runs of Cosmos it will be of interest to see what sorts of shapes they adopt, and how much variety in shape exists across the population.