CAD platform for programmable living CA SECTION 1: ABSTRACT Biology is becoming programmable, but it lacks much of the design infrastructure for exploring spatial systems. So, I’d like to construct a spatial design tool for engineering microbial consortia that exhibit programmable cellular automata behaviour by building a simulation engine that translates CA rules into genetic circuit specification that would first be validated in a wet-lab environment via Opentrons. The central hypothesis is that bacterial LuxI/LuxR quorum-sensing circuits can implement the neighbour-counting and state-switching logic of classical cellular automata, and that this mapping is regular enough to be captured by a simulation engine and ultimately predicted by machine learning models.