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When multicellular systems need to communicate over long distances, and signalling molecules are too slow to diffuse, travelling fronts of these molecules emerge—a phenomenon now reconstituted in a coupled array of artificial cells. Living systems employ front propagation and spatiotemporal patterns encoded in biochemical reactions for communication, self-organization and computation1,2,3,4. Emulating such dynamics in minimal systems is important for understanding physical principles in living cells5,6,7,8 and in vitro9,10,11,12,13,14. Here, we report a one-dimensional array of DNA compartments in a silicon chip as a coupled system of artificial cells, offering the means to implement reaction–diffusion dynamics by integrated genetic circuits and chip geometry. Using a bistable circuit we programmed a front of protein synthesis propagating in the array as a cascade of signal amplification and short-range diffusion. The front velocity is maximal at a saddle-node bifurcation from a bistable regime with travelling fronts to a monostable regime that is spatially homogeneous. Near the bifurcation the system exhibits large variability between compartments, providing a possible mechanism for population diversity. This demonstrates that on-chip integrated gene circuits are dynamical systems driving spatiotemporal patterns, cellular variability and symmetry breaking.

Propagating gene expression fronts in a one-dimensional coupled system of artificial cells