Cyanobacteria engineering for restoring environments (CYBER)

污染是当今最紧迫的全球挑战之一，威胁着我们的生态系统、健康和福祉。由于在自然环境中大规模部署的复杂性，传统的环境清理方法往往达不到要求。我们迫切需要重新思考我们的战略。该项目旨在利用蓝藻的潜力--地球上最古老和最多样化的生物之一--开启新的方法。蓝藻在许多环境中普遍存在，由于其固定氮和进行光合作用的能力，在基本的生态系统服务中发挥着至关重要的作用。但是，尽管人们对利用蓝藻进行生物修复越来越感兴趣，但我们目前缺乏可靠的生物部件和实验工具来安全地重新编程蓝藻来完成这项任务。在这个项目中，我们提出了一个多学科的努力来克服这些障碍，并使工程蓝藻成为一个可行的平台来恢复退化的环境。为了将这一点存档，我们的项目围绕四个具体目标构建。首先，我们的目标是建设我们所说的“生态风洞”。这些我们可以在实验室中建立的人工生态系统，更好地模拟了现实世界中复杂的时空组织和相互作用。通过将工程生物置于这些更现实的条件下，我们可以增强它们的功能，对它们在自然环境中的表现有更大的信心，并比在典型的实验室环境中更准确地评估它们的生态影响。第二，我们将使用大规模并行分析和基于测序的监测技术，结合严格的测量和先进的人工智能，以促进重新编程蓝藻的生物工具的快速开发。第三，为了确保我们的工程细胞在自然环境中的可追踪性，并促进它们的安全部署，我们将开发出对我们的生物体进行条形码的方法。这将使我们能够更好地跟踪它们的扩散情况，并在商业背景下确定这些生物体的所有权。最后，作为案例研究，我们将改造蓝藻，使其能够自然地从环境中吸收各种污染物，并改变它们的生物，以简化它们从环境中的物理去除。这种有针对性地移除我们的工程生物学的能力，将有助于减少我们的细胞对自然生态系统的任何长期影响，因为它只允许它们暂时存在，而不是为它们提供足够的时间来嵌入。除了科学之外，我们还认识到，随着这项技术的发展，早期与社会和政策制定者接触的关键作用。因此，我们与一系列领先的学者、公司、非营利组织和资助者合作，建立一个社区，并将举办包容性活动，将我们的科学与更广泛的社会和政府决策者联系起来。我们的目标是利用这一互动点来了解人们的担忧，交流关于科学的基于证据的风险和好处，并探索在环境背景下可接受使用工程生物学的可能途径。此外，该项目中执行的科学和参与将有助于彻底改变污染控制战略，并启动新的可持续的基于生物的环境恢复解决方案。它还将开发必要的关键基础工具和方法，以降低将工程生物学部署到现实世界生态系统中的风险，并帮助将蓝藻建立为应对各种环境挑战的多功能和安全平台。

Pollution is one of the most pressing global challenges of today, threatening our ecosystems, health, and wellbeing. Traditional approaches to environmental clean-up often fall short due to the complexity of deploying them at scale into natural environments. There is an urgent need to rethink our strategy. This project aims to harness the potential of cyanobacteria - one of the oldest and most diverse organisms on Earth - to unlock new approaches. Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous in many environments and play a crucial role in basic ecosystem services due to their ability to fix nitrogen and perform photosynthesis. But despite a growing interest in the use of cyanobacteria for bioremediation, we currently lack reliable biological parts and experimental tools to safely reprogram cyanobacteria for this task. In this project we propose a multidisciplinary effort to overcome these hurdles and make engineered cyanobacteria a feasible platform for restoration of degraded environments. To archive this, our project is built around four specific objectives. First, we will aim to construct what we term "ecological wind tunnels". These artificial ecosystems that we can build in the lab, better mimic the complex spatial-temporal organization and interactions found in the real world. By subjecting engineered organisms to these more realistic conditions, we can enhance their functionality, have greater confidence in their ability to perform in natural environments, and evaluate their ecological impact more accurately than in a typical lab setting. Second, we will use massively parallel assays and sequencing-based surveillance techniques, combined with rigorous measurements and advanced artificial intelligence, to facilitate the rapid development of biological tools for reprogramming cyanobacteria. Third, to ensure the traceability of our engineered cells in natural environments and facilitate their safe deployment, we will develop approaches to "barcode" our organisms. This will enable us to better track their dispersal and establish ownership of the organisms in commercial contexts. Finally, as a case study, we will engineer cyanobacteria that are able to naturally absorb various pollutants from the environment and alter their biology to simplify their physical removal from the environment. This ability to remove our engineered biology in a targeted way will help to reduce any long-term impact our cells have on a natural ecosystem by allowing them to only be present temporarily and not provide sufficient time for them to become embedded.In addition to the science, we also recognise the crucial role of early engagement with society and policy makers around the acceptable use of this technology as it is developed. We have therefore partnered with a range of leading academics, companies, non-profit organisations, and funders to build a community and will hold inclusive events that connect our science to wider society and decision makers in government. We aim to use this point of interaction to understand concerns, communicate evidence-based risks and benefits regarding the science, and explore possible routes towards the acceptable use of engineered biology in environmental contexts.Together, the science and engagement performed in this project will help revolutionize pollution control strategies and kick-start new sustainable bio-based solutions to environmental restoration. It will also develop the crucial foundational tools and methods needed to de-risk the deployment of engineered biology into real-world ecosystems and help to establish cyanobacteria as a versatile and safe platform for tackling diverse environmental challenges.