Rules of life in CO2-driven microbial communities: Microbiome engineering for a Net Zero future

二氧化碳驱动的微生物群落的生命规则：净零未来的微生物组工程

• 批准号: BB/Y003195/1
• 负责人: Sophie Nixon
• 金额: $ 563.71万
• 依托单位: University of Manchester
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FY003195%2F1
• 关键词: Rules; life; CO2; driven; microbial

Microbial communities (often called microbiomes) are everywhere; on our skin, in our gut, in the soil we rely on to grow our food, indeed in almost every habitable environment on the planet. Members of microbiomes interact with one another in myriad ways which we are only just beginning to appreciate, thanks largely to powerful new tools at our disposal. In this ambitious, multidisciplinary project, we bring together expertise to use these tools to unearth the 'rules of life' that govern the interactions between microbial community members, with the view to develop predictive approaches that can help us to understand and control microbiome function. Drawing on low diversity communities that inhabit geothermal springs, we will interrogate the metabolic, ecological and evolutionary interactions between community members that collectively govern the conversion of CO2 into value-added products. These products span primary metabolites that result from direct microbial growth (and hold value as platform chemicals for manufacturing industries and as biofuels), as well as secondary metabolites that are not directly liked to growth but that play ill-defined roles in microbial communities, and often harbour bioactive properties of high value to society (e.g. antibiotics, anticancers). We will use synthetic biology approaches to engineer the microbiome and its metabolic pathways of interest, both as a learning tool with which to test hypotheses on metabolite production and function, and as a means to augment the CO2 bioconversion capacity of the system for future biotechnological development. In parallel, we will apply ecological and metabolic modelling approaches to continue to generate hypotheses that can be tested with our model system, and which will be integrated into new predictive tools to accurately infer function from microbiome genomic data. Crucially, these approaches will work in tandem to help resolve the microbe-microbe interactions that drive this model system, which we have deliberately chosen to maximise the success of our ambitious goals. By unravelling the rules of life in these low-diversity systems, we will take the first major step towards understanding the more complex communities that impact our ability to grow food and live healthy lives. At the same time, our project promises to deliver new ways to turn waste CO2 emissions into waste, towards a more sustainable and Net Zero future.

微生物群落（通常称为微生物组）无处不在。在我们的皮肤，肠道中，在土壤中，我们依靠地在地球上几乎每个可居住的环境中种植食物。微生物成员以多种方式相互互动，我们才刚刚开始欣赏，这在很大程度上要归功于我们可以使用的强大的新工具。在这个雄心勃勃的多学科项目中，我们将专业知识汇集在一起​​，使用这些工具来发掘管理微生物社区成员之间相互作用的“生命规则”，并认为可以开发可以帮助我们理解和控制微生物组功能的预测方法。利用居住在地热泉的低多样性社区，我们将质疑社区成员之间的代谢，生态和进化相互作用，这些社区成员共同管理二氧化碳转换为增值产品。这些产品涵盖了由直接微生物生长（并作为制造业和生物燃料作为平台化学物质）以及次要代谢产物而产生的原代代谢产物，这些代谢物以及不直接喜欢增长的次生代谢产物，但在微生物社区中起不确定的作用，并且通常在社会中具有高价值的生物活性（例如，对社会具有高价值的生物活性）（例如，抗生素，抗生素，抗生素）。我们将使用合成生物学方法来设计微生物组及其代谢途径，既可以作为一种学习工具来测试代谢物生产和功能的假设，又是增强系统的CO2生物转化能力的手段，以实现未来的生物技术发展。同时，我们将采用生态和代谢建模方法继续生成可以通过我们的模型系统测试的假设，并将其集成到新的预测工具中，以准确地从微生物组基因组数据中推断功能。至关重要的是，这些方法将同时起作用，以帮助解决驱动该模型系统的微生物 - 微生物相互作用，我们故意选择了这些模型系统，以最大程度地提高我们雄心勃勃的目标的成功。通过揭示这些低多样性系统中的生活规则，我们将迈出第一步，朝着了解影响我们种植食物和生活健康生活能力的更复杂社区。同时，我们的项目有望提供新的方法，以将废物二氧化碳排放变成废物，朝着更可持续和净零的未来。