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

水务工业依赖各种微生物的联合来履行其一些最重要的功能(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，不仅显著改善了我们的生活质量，还扭转了我们环境的快速退化。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指导的，要么是通过基于试验和错误的工程方法来指导的，这些方法基本上是自上而下的。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批量控制，从而使大规模的环境效应被设计为刺激或抑制整个微生物组的功能(例如，控制氧等电子受体的可用性)。我们建议开发一种新的方法，这种方法不依赖于偶发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，即在逐个细胞的基础上。我们对这种方法的信心不仅来自于最近在组学技术、合成生物学和3D打印方面的技术突破，也源于对产生我们周围巨大微生物及其新陈代谢潜力的进化过程的深切尊重。通过EPSRC赞助奖，我们建议在我们国内的大学和英国催化研究势头，开始探索合成微生物群落组装如何实现，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，我们提出了一系列具有战略意义的活动(例如，研究访问、研讨会、务虚会)，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联系，使核心研究团队参与到这一大胆的研究主题中来。

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.