ABSTRACT: The mouse intestinal bacterial collection (miBC) represents a unique resource of cultivable bacteria isolates from mice that enables engineering of minimal gut consortia.
Project description:Metagenomes of intestinal samples were obtained from wild type mice to determine the functional and taxonomic coverage by available cultivable bacteria isolated from mouse.
Project description:Diversity of extremely halophilic cultivable prokaryotes in Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific solar salterns: evidences that unexplored sites constitute sources of cultivable novelty
Project description:Engineering resource allocation in biological systems is an ongoing challenge. Organisms allocate resources for ensuring survival, reducing the productivity of synthetic biology functions. Here we present a novel approach for engineering the resource allocation of Escherichia coli by rationally modifying its transcriptional regulatory network. Our method (ReProMin) identifies the minimal set of genetic interventions that maximises the savings in cell resources. To this end, we categorized Transcription Factors according to the essentiality of its targets and we used proteomic data to rank them. We designed the combinatorial removal of TFs that maximise the release of resources. Our resulting strain containing only three mutations, theoretically releasing 0.5% of its proteome, had higher proteome budget, increased production of an engineered metabolic pathway and showed that the regulatory interventions are highly specific. This approach shows that combining proteomic and regulatory data is an effective way of optimizing strains using conventional molecular methods.
Project description:Synthetic microbial consortia represent a new frontier for synthetic biology given that they can solve more complex problems than monocultures. However, most attempts to co-cultivate these artificial communities fail because of the ‘‘winner-takes-all’’ in nutrients competition. In soil, multiple species can coexist with a spatial organization. Inspired by nature, here we show that an engineered spatial segregation method can assemble stable consortia with both flexibility and precision. We create microbial swarmbot consortia (MSBC) by encapsulating subpopulations with polymeric microcapsules. The crosslinked structure of microcapsules fences microbes, but allows the transport of small molecules and proteins. MSBC method enables the assembly of various synthetic communities and the precise control over the subpopulations. These capabilities can readily modulate the division of labor and communication. Our work integrates the synthetic biology and material science to offer new insights into consortia assembly and server as foundation to diverse applications from biomanufacturing to engineered photosynthesis.