Sponsorship Award. Cell-by-Cell: On Demand Assembly & Control of Microbial Communities for the Water Industry.

水工业依靠各种微生物的联合体来执行一些最重要的功能（例如废水处理、生物饮用水处理、可再生能源生产）。这些微生物组合为我们提供了技术，这些技术不仅显著提高了我们的生活质量，而且扭转了我们环境的迅速退化。到目前为止，这些复杂微生物群落的组装要么是由偶然的环境条件引导的，要么是通过基于试错法的工程方法引导的，这些方法本质上主要是自上而下的。为了与这种自上而下的组装保持一致，这些群落的功能也被大量控制，因此大规模的环境影响被设计来刺激或抑制整个微生物群的功能（例如控制电子受体如氧的可用性）。我们建议开发一种新的方法，这种方法不依赖于偶然的环境条件或批量控制，而是自下而上地设计微生物群落的组装和控制，即以细胞为基础。我们对这种方法的信心不仅受到最近在组学技术、合成生物学和3D打印方面的技术突破的启发；但同时也对进化过程深表敬意，正是这种进化过程造就了我们周围庞大的微生物群及其代谢潜力。通过EPSRC赞助奖，我们建议在我们的国内大学和英国催化研究势头，开始探索如何合成微生物群落组装可能完成，它如何改进现有技术，并为水行业带来根本性的技术突破。为此，我们提出了一系列有战略意义的活动（如研究访问、研讨会、务静会），通过获得新的研究专业知识，并与来自英国、欧洲和美国的广泛的学术和工业合作伙伴网络建立联系，将核心研究者团队参与到这个冒险的研究主题中。

The water industry has relied on consortia of diverse microorganisms to perform some of its most vital functions (e.g. wastewater treatment, biological drinking water treatment, renewable energy production). These microbial assemblages have provided us with technologies that have not only significantly improved our quality of life, but also reversed the rapid degradation of our environment. The assembly of these complex microbial communities has thus far been guided either by happenstance environmental conditions or through trial-and-error based engineering approaches that are largely top-down in nature. In keeping with this top-down assembly, the function of these communities is also controlled in bulk, such that large-scale environmental effects are engineered to stimulate or inhibit functions of entire groups of microorganisms (e.g. controlling the availability of electron acceptors such as oxygen). We are proposing the development of a new approach that does not rely on happenstance environmental condition or bulk control, but rather engineers the assembly and control of microbial communities from the bottom-up, i.e. on a cell-by-cell basis. Our confidence in this approach is inspired not only by the recent technological breakthroughs in 'omics technologies, synthetic biology and 3D printing; but also a deep respect for the evolutionary processes that have generated the microbial vastness and its metabolic potential around us. Through the EPSRC Sponsorship Award, we propose to catalyze research momentum within our home universities and the UK to start exploring how synthetic microbial community assembly may accomplish, how it may improve existing technologies, and deliver radical technological breakthroughs for the water industry. To do this, we have proposed a series of strategically timed activities (e.g. research visits, workshops, retreats) that will engage the core investigator team in this adventurous research theme by gaining new research expertise and connecting with a broad network of academic and industrial partners from the UK, Europe, and USA.