A high throughput approach for building and surveying the emergent properties of synthetic ecologies

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

Complex communities of interacting microbes live on practically every surface of this planet and play critical roles in global ecosystems. Recapitulating communities synthetically in the lab is a critical step toward understanding how they form and function and could one day be utilized for new applications in biotechnology and biomedicine. Towards this end, this project will create new methods to rapidly build communities of different microbes, to understand their interactions, and to identify new sources of antibiotics. This project will also provide educational and technical training aimed at increasing the number of undergraduates and graduates pursuing careers in STEM fields. Additionally, this project contains an integrated education component and will develop new courses for undergraduate and graduate students aimed at increasing the awareness of the social, ethical, and biosafety/security dimensions of synthetic community research. This curriculum will be broadly disseminated to the community to improve bioethics education in STEM degree programs. Microbial communities comprise the predominant social structures of life and are critical players in our global ecosystems, yet their potential as contributors to a sustainable future remains largely untapped. Synthetic microbial communities can provide insights into understanding the underlying principles of microbial social behaviors, which, in turn, can catalyze the development of novel translational applications. However, the emergent phenotypes of synthetic communities have remained largely unexplored due to their complexity and the need to develop technologies and approaches that are high throughput, scalable, and permissive of systematic investigation. To address this gap in knowledge, this project will devise an innovative, high-throughput method to build synthetic ecologies and screen for emergent properties focusing on novel biosynthetic and biocatabolic capabilities of natural and synthetic microbial communities. By screening millions of multi-strain droplets, with each microdroplet acting as a spatially separate synthetic ecology, this work will provide important insights into how new functionalities emerge . This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.