Coupling spatial segregation with synthetic circuits to control bacterial survival.

ABSTRACT: Engineered bacteria have great potential for medical and environmental applications. Fulfilling this potential requires controllability over engineered behaviors and scalability of the engineered systems. Here, we present a platform technology, microbial swarmbot, which employs spatial arrangement to control the growth dynamics of engineered bacteria. As a proof of principle, we demonstrated a safeguard strategy to prevent unintended bacterial proliferation. In particular, we adopted several synthetic gene circuits to program collective survival in Escherichia coli: the engineered bacteria could only survive when present at sufficiently high population densities. When encapsulated by permeable membranes, these bacteria can sense the local environment and respond accordingly. The cells insi

SUBMITTER: Huang S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4770385 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature