cellularä

Cellularä is a fictional concept used in speculative biology and some science fiction narratives to describe a proposed state of cellular organization in which cells coordinate through a highly distributed, organism-spanning computation network. The term blends "cellular" with a stylized diacritic to suggest a distinct category or mode of functioning beyond conventional multicellularity.

It imagines cells or cell types maintaining continuous, multi-scale signaling loops—molecular, electrical, and metabolic—forming a lattice of interacting agents. In this model, local cell decisions contribute to global tissue behavior, enabling adaptive pattern formation, wound response, and developmental processes through emergent computation rather than centralized control.

The idea appears mainly in theoretical discussions and fiction. It is not part of established biology; no experimental framework or consensus defines its mechanisms, and it is treated as a thought experiment rather than a validated paradigm.

Explorations of cellularä are used to illustrate topics in systems biology, network theory, and ethics of augmentation, highlighting questions about autonomy, responsibility, and the limits of artificial modulation of cellular networks.

See also: cell signaling, systems biology, emergent properties, cellular automata, synthetic biology.