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With the recent demonstration of real-time gene networks control in-vivo, new opportunities became available to Control Engineers to contribute to the development of new and exciting results at the boundary of Systems and Synthetic Biology. In this talk I will discuss how I took advantage of the lessons learnt while working on the control of synthetic gene circuits to regulate a bacterial behavioural trait stemming from a well known signalling pathway, namely aerotaxis (i.e. the migration of microorganisms in response to oxygen gradients). To this aim I will first present two modelling approaches I used to quantitatively describe this behaviour starting from high-throughput experimental data: (a) one based on Systems Identification principles and (b) the other deeply rooted in the biophysics of the intracellular signal transduction that mediates aerotaxis in my model system, i.e. Bacillus subtilis. I will then show how the information obtained in this process enabled both (a) the discovery of a peculiar dynamical property (i.e. logarithmic-sensing) B. subtilis might use to optimize its search for oxygen and (b) to achieve in-vivo positioning control of bacterial populations in microfluidic devices. I will then conclude discussing some of the efforts currently ongoing in my group to expand these results and adapt the closed loop approach I previously developed to implement a real-time model-discrimination algorithm in-vivo.