Engineering microbial communities for distributed computation using bacterial micro compartments.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Building distributed biological systems is an attractive prospect for synthetic biology as italleviates the constraints associated with engineering single strains and allows us to expandthe applications of our systems into areas including complex biosensing and diagnostic tools,bioprocess control and the monitoring of industrial processes. The Barnes group has beenworking towards the engineering of bacterial communities to serve as distributedbiocomputing systems capable of integrating signal information and decision making (eglogic gates, neural networks). Using mathematical modelling we have designed microbialinteractions and then constructed communities either within bioreactors or in spatial"computational biofilms".Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) are selectively permeable shells in prokaryotic cellsthat are analogous to organelles in eukaryotes. Many BMCs enable microbes to utilize specificenergy, carbon, and nitrogen sources that are niche specific and therefore contribute to bothforming and distorting bacterial communities. BMCs architectures are also attractive asnanotechnology platforms with applications in metabolic engineering and biomedicine. TheFrank group have been working on the design and production of recombinant BMCs withspecified properties.This project will build on the knowledge of both groups and bring together different aspectsof engineering microbial communities and bacterial microcompartments. There are threemain strands:Aim 1) the use of BMCs as an additional part in the synthetic biology toolkit for theconstruction of microbial communities that form distributed computing systems.Aim 2) apply machine learning approaches to the optimisation of nanoparticle production. Wewill build on our existing reinforcement learning framework for control of microbialpopulations in bioreactors.Aim 3) the use of BMCs to develop novel therapeutic bacteria that can manipulate extantmicrobiomesThese approaches have the potential to revolutionise how we engineer microbialcommunities with new functionalities in biocomputing and therapeutics.