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

本项目将结合微流体、显微技术和测序技术来研究土壤微生物的活性，探索土壤微生物组研究的下一个前沿领域。我们的目标是设计“细菌- on - a - chip”微流控技术，以破译单细胞水平上细菌群落的反应性。我们的目标是开发微流控化学调节剂来了解孢子激活，评估复杂细菌群落的反应性，分离和鉴定表现出非常高反应性的物种，并开发闭环微流控平台来引导基因表达或细胞行为朝着期望的目标发展，以帮助鉴定新的生物接种剂，优化植物生长和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.