Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) is an emerging technology that aims to extend our connectivity to nanoscale and biological environments with collaborative nanonetworks of artificial nanomachines and biological entities integrated into the Internet infrastructure. To enable the IoBNT and its groundbreaking applications, such as continuous intrabody health monitoring, it is imperative to devise low-complexity nanoscale communication techniques suitable for the envisioned nanomachines of simple architectures. The most promising communication technology for realizing the IoBNT is Molecular Communications (MC), as it ubiquitously manifests itself in many complex biological systems in the Universe, and thus, stands as one of the most common communication modalities, optimized from many aspects as a result of billions of years of evolutionary advancement.

Making use of this naturally existing technology requires understanding its foundations through our existing modeling and analysis tools. This quest, which started almost 15 years ago, has received increasing attention from ICT researchers, which have been overly inspired by conventional electromagnetic communication technologies in their approach to this radically different paradigm. These theoretical approaches, however, have not always come with sufficient physical relevance. Currently, this emerging field has come to a critical turning point, as many researchers have started to report on initial MC experiments following different approaches and using different materials, while consistently pointing out a discrepancy between the obtained experimental results and the past theoretical work. This reveals the need to rethink the previous efforts and come up with new interdisciplinary strategies, thus building practical MC techniques and developing feasible MC system components, experimental testbeds, and prototypes in order to close the gap between theory and practice, and expedite the transfer of this emerging technology to the market.

Among the challenges stated above, this Special Issue is particularly focused on the practical aspects of MC. Therefore, we are calling for technical papers that report on new research with the potential to move this field forward towards its practical application, as well as surveys/tutorials focusing on the practical challenges of MC research. Hence, its scope encompasses a wide range of interdisciplinary research topics, with some examples listed as follows: 

• The physical design, modeling, and implementation of MC system components (e.g., transmitter, receiver, channel);
• The design and implementation of MC testbeds;
• Practical and low-complexity MC methods (e.g., modulation, detection, channel estimation, synchronization, coding methods);
• The testing and validation of MC transceiver/channel models and MC methods;
• Applications of microfluidics, biosensors, and nanomaterials for MC system design;
• Bio-cyber interfaces between MC networks and conventional macroscale networks;
• Synthetic biology-based MC transceiver architectures;
• Optimization of ligand-receptor interactions for MC;
• Biocompatibility and co-existence challenges;
• Energy harvesting and power transfer techniques for MC networks;

The design and demonstration of MC applications (e.g., those in healthcare, agriculture, biocomputing).

Dr. Murat Kuscu
Dr. Ergin Dinc
Dr. Bige Deniz Unluturk
Dr. Michael Barros
Dr. Sasitharan Balasubramaniam
Dr. Kerstin Lenk
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Molecules is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• molecular communications
• internet of bio-nano Things
• nanonetworks
• biosensors
• nanomaterials
• microfluidics
• ligand-receptor interactions
• bio-cyber interfaces