This mirrors work showing aggregates more effectively capture extracellular metabolites (doi.org/10.1371/jour...) and that flocculation improves crossfeeding (doi.org/10.1038/s415...)! Thus, the benefits of synthetic flocculation could relate more to metabolite sharing than diffusion limitations.
We hypothesize that the reversibility of FLO1 adhesion, which allows cells to exchange places, improves mass transport to the aggregate center, limiting a large source of either costs or benefits. In this way, synthetic flocs could be a powerful chassis for multicellular designs.