21ENGBIO Engineering bacterial 'sense and respond' systems to control microbial communities

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In nature, bacteria usually grow together within multi-species communities. Growing in a community has many benefits including protection from invaders, access to extra resources, and the ability to work together to achieve tasks. Based on these benefits, there are many ways that we would like to use communities of engineered bacteria for our benefit. These include applications in human and animal health and nutrition, for example as biomedicines and to help reduce antibiotic usage; in agriculture, for example improving seed and soil health; in biomanufacturing, creating greener bioprocesses; and as solutions to environmental challenges, such as through bioremediation. To safely and reliably use engineered bacterial communities we need them to behave in a predictable way once they are deployed. Unfortunately, we still don't have a good understanding of how communities of bacteria grow, particularly when the growth environment changes. This leads to unpredictable growth and behaviour and holds back more widespread use of applied bacterial communities.We want to solve this problem by using synthetic biology to make bacterial communities whose growth and composition can be controlled even after they are deployed to solve a real-world application. We imagine this like a tuning knob, dialling up or down the presence of a bacterial species to get the community to behave in a certain way, even if the growing conditions have changed. As part of this work, we will also develop new types of tools to sense the nutrients that are available to a bacterial species as it grows within a community. Because bacterial growth within communities is central to many different avenues of research and development, this project has the potential to have wide ranging impacts.