Solé Vicente, Ricard, 1962-Conde Pueyo, Núria, 1983-Pla, JordiGarcía Ojalvo, JordiMontserrat Pulido, NúriaLevin, Michael2025-02-212025-02-212024Solé R, Conde-Pueyo N, Pla-Mauri J, Garcia-Ojalvo J, Montserrat N, Levin M. Open problems in synthetic multicellularity. NPJ Syst Biol Appl. 2024 Dec 31;10(1):151. DOI: 10.1038/s41540-024-00477-82056-7189http://hdl.handle.net/10230/69672Multicellularity is one of the major evolutionary transitions, and its rise provided the ingredients for the emergence of a biosphere inhabited by complex organisms. Over the last decades, the potential for bioengineering multicellular systems has been instrumental in interrogating nature and exploring novel paths to regeneration, disease, cognition, and behaviour. Here, we provide a list of open problems that encapsulate many of the ongoing and future challenges in the field and suggest conceptual approaches that may facilitate progress.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41540-024-00477-8Multicellular systemsSynthetic biologyinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess