A high throughput approach for building and surveying the emergent properties of synthetic ecologies

复杂的微生物群落相互作用，几乎存在于地球的每一个表面，在全球生态系统中起着至关重要的作用。在实验室中综合概括群落是了解它们如何形成和功能的关键一步，并且有一天可以用于生物技术和生物医学的新应用。为此，该项目将创造新的方法来快速建立不同微生物的群落，了解它们的相互作用，并确定抗生素的新来源。该项目还将提供教育和技术培训，旨在增加在STEM领域从事职业的本科生和毕业生的数量。此外，该项目包含一个综合教育组成部分，并将为本科生和研究生开发新的课程，旨在提高对合成社区研究的社会、伦理和生物安全/保障方面的认识。该课程将广泛传播给社会各界，以改善STEM学位课程的生物伦理教育。微生物群落构成了生命的主要社会结构，是我们全球生态系统的关键参与者，但它们作为可持续未来贡献者的潜力在很大程度上尚未得到开发。合成微生物群落可以为理解微生物社会行为的基本原理提供见解，这反过来又可以促进新的转化应用的发展。然而，由于合成群落的复杂性和开发高通量、可扩展和允许系统调查的技术和方法的需要，它们的新兴表型在很大程度上仍未被探索。为了解决这一知识缺口，该项目将设计一种创新的、高通量的方法来构建合成生态，并筛选自然和合成微生物群落的新生物合成和生物代谢能力。通过筛选数百万个多菌株液滴，每个微液滴作为一个空间独立的合成生态，这项工作将为新功能如何出现提供重要的见解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Complex communities of interacting microbes live on practically every surface of this planet and play critical roles in global ecosystems. Recapitulating communities synthetically in the lab is a critical step toward understanding how they form and function and could one day be utilized for new applications in biotechnology and biomedicine. Towards this end, this project will create new methods to rapidly build communities of different microbes, to understand their interactions, and to identify new sources of antibiotics. This project will also provide educational and technical training aimed at increasing the number of undergraduates and graduates pursuing careers in STEM fields. Additionally, this project contains an integrated education component and will develop new courses for undergraduate and graduate students aimed at increasing the awareness of the social, ethical, and biosafety/security dimensions of synthetic community research. This curriculum will be broadly disseminated to the community to improve bioethics education in STEM degree programs. Microbial communities comprise the predominant social structures of life and are critical players in our global ecosystems, yet their potential as contributors to a sustainable future remains largely untapped. Synthetic microbial communities can provide insights into understanding the underlying principles of microbial social behaviors, which, in turn, can catalyze the development of novel translational applications. However, the emergent phenotypes of synthetic communities have remained largely unexplored due to their complexity and the need to develop technologies and approaches that are high throughput, scalable, and permissive of systematic investigation. To address this gap in knowledge, this project will devise an innovative, high-throughput method to build synthetic ecologies and screen for emergent properties focusing on novel biosynthetic and biocatabolic capabilities of natural and synthetic microbial communities. By screening millions of multi-strain droplets, with each microdroplet acting as a spatially separate synthetic ecology, this work will provide important insights into how new functionalities emerge .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.