BACTERIA-ON-A-CHIP: Microfluidic chemostats to decipher the responsiveness of bacterial communities

该项目将通过结合微流体、显微镜和测序来研究微生物的活性，从而追求土壤微生物组研究的下一个前沿。我们的目标是设计“芯片上的细菌”微流控技术，在单细胞水平上破译细菌群落的响应。我们的目标是开发微流控化合物，以了解孢子激活，评估复杂细菌群落的响应性，分离和鉴定表现出非常高反应活性的物种，并开发闭环微流控平台，以引导基因表达或细胞行为达到预期目标，以帮助识别新的生物接种剂，优化植物生长，提高农业的可持续性。

This project will pursue the next frontier in soil microbiome research by combining microfluidics, microscopy and sequencing to investigate microbial activation. Our objective is to engineer 'BACTERIA-ON-A-CHIP' microfluidic technologies to decipher the responsiveness of bacterial communities at single-cell level. We aim to develop microfluidic chemostats to understand spore activation, assess the responsiveness of complex bacterial communities, isolate and identify species that exhibit very high reactivity and develop closed-loop microfluidic platforms to steer gene expression or cell behaviour towards desired goals to aid the identification of new bioinoculants, optimise plant growth and improve sustainability in agriculture.