Many technical challenges exist in the co-culture of multiple types of cells, including medium optimization, cell-to-cell connection, and selective data acquisition of cellular responses. Particularly, mixed cellular responses limit the precise interpretation of intercellular signal transduction. Here, we report the formation of an agarose gel skin on neurons closely assembled with gustatory cells to selectively stimulate gustatory cells by retarding the diffusion of tastants to neurons. The signal transmission, triggered by denatonium benzoate, from gustatory cells to neurons was monitored using intracellular calcium ion concentrations. The agarose gel skin efficiently suppressed the direct transfer of tastants to neurons, decreasing the number of responsive neurons from 56 to 13% and the number of calcium ion signals per neuron from multiple to single. The assembly of neurons with gustatory cells induced the high level of neuronal responses through taste signal transduction from gustatory cells to neurons. However, the calcium ion signal peaks of free neurons coated with agarose gel were much shorter and weaker than those of neurons closely assembled with gustatory cells. This work demonstrated that agarose gel skin is a simple, fast, and effective means to increase the signal selectivity of cellular responses in the co-culture of multiple types of cells.

Natural light‐harvesting complexes are operated through the well‐designed self‐assembly of pigments with large protein complexes in a thylakoid lipid bilayer. However, a long‐range, directed transfer of excitation energy has not been achieved in artificial systems because the nanoscale arrangement of chromophores into stable micrometer‐scale structures is highly challenging. Here the multiscale assembly of chromophores for excited energy transfer through the arrangement of chromophores on nanoscale DNA templates followed by their incorporation into larger multilamellar lipid structures is reported. Single‐strand 10 nucleotide DNA molecules containing a terminal residue linked with three different chromophores are hybridized with their complementary 30 nucleotide matrix DNA strand. Due to the short DNA sequences, the energy transfer of the DNA‐templated chromophore arrays is limited at 4 °C. However, the incorporation of DNA‐templated chromophores into lipid‐DNA complexes dramatically increases both of the efficiencies and antenna effects of the single and two‐step energy transfers at room temperature through the structural stabilization and the secondary assembly of DNA between the interstitial spaces of multilamellar lipid structures. The findings suggest that the supramolecular alignment of DNA‐templated chromophores, which has never been explored previously, can be a very promising route toward directed, long‐range light harvesting.