UKRI/BBSRC-NSF/BIO: Controlling synthetic microbial community structure using physical & biological containment

The behavior and function of microbial communities can be driven by the spatial arrangement of their members. However, few molecular strategies exist to direct the self-assembly of some community members and not others. This project seeks to repurpose innovative tools, recently generated in the field of biological containment, for the study and control of the structure of microbial communities. The benefit will be greater understanding of the principles by which natural and synthetic microbial communities arrange themselves for improved function in settings such as soil, which in turn aids the health of ecosystems. These modified microbial communities would enhance applications in biotechnology as well as the containment of environmental toxic waste. In addition, scientists in the UK and US will conduct local outreach activities to strengthen the pipeline of students interested in STEM and public awareness of microbial containment techniques. This project engineers certain microbes whose persistence rely on molecules that do not occur in nature as well as other microbes. This creates a new metabolic interaction that is required for survival of the dependent microbe and is exclusive to this pair of microbes. The project investigates whether such interactions can create predictable spatial variation, including within a larger synthetic microbial community. The project also investigates innovative advances in physical containment techniques to understand how the encapsulation of one of the engineered microbes affects the entire spatial arrangement or maintain distinct conditions. Together, the application of physical and biological containment techniques holds promise for understanding the rules of spatial association between microbes in a microbial community. This collaborative US/UK project is supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), where NSF funds the US investigator and BBSRC funds the partners in the UK. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.