Background

In order to improve globally equality, both monetary and medically, the accessibility of new technologies is imperative. Our project designed a intercellular communication and control system that could be used to stabilise the composition of mixed populations of bacteria. This would allow access to complicated biological systems such as microbial consortia.

Microbial consortia are populations of bacteria or other microorganisms that work together. They exist naturally and have been proven to be more survivable and adaptable than monocultures^{1, 2}. Why then do large scale biotech industries often use monocultures? The production of quorn³ and antibiotics⁴ are often done with only one species or strain of organism.

This is to prevent the effects of competition between strains. In envrionments where production of product can be detrimental to the organism’s health, adding in competition is another problem to the difficult task of optimizing production.

Current uses of microbial consortia are subject to problems (link to ziegler report?). These include: interspecies competition; sensitivity to changes in feedstock and long reestablishment times following reactor replacement. We attempt to solve these problems by introducing novel intercellular communication, greater responsiveness, and population control methods to our microbial system. These allow the community to better regulate its composition, while also providing faster feedback on its status, so that problems can be identified before the community collapses.

If microbial consortia can be designed more easily the possibility of using multiple strains of bacteria to produce complex biomaterial or degrade recalcitrant materials is not a theory.^{5, 6} Things such as bacterial cellulose membranes with a mixture of specialised filtration proteins interwoven between its fibers or the controlled degradation of biomass into fuel or electricity may be accessible to DIY biotech laboratories around the world.

1. Wintermute, E. H., & Silver, P. A. (2010). Dynamics in the mixed microbial concourse. Genes & Development, 24(23), 2603-2614. doi: 10.1101/gad.1985210
2. Sørensen, S. R., Ronen, Z., & Aamand, J. (2002). Growth in Coculture Stimulates Metabolism of the Phenylurea Herbicide Isoproturon by Sphingomonas sp. Strain SRS2. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 68(7), 3478-3485. doi: 10.1128/aem.68.7.3478-3485.2002
3. WIEBE, M. G., NOVÁKOVA, M., MILLER, L., BLAKEBROUGH, M. L., ROBSON, G. D., PUNT, P. J., & TRINCI, A. P. J. (1997). Protoplast production and transformation of morphological mutants of the Quorn® myco-protein fungus, Fusarium graminearum A3/5, using the hygromycin B resistance plasmid pAN7-1. Mycological Research, 101(07), 871-877. doi: doi:10.1017/S0953756296003425.
4. Hendlin, D., Stapley, E. O., Jackson, M., Wallick, H., Miller, A. K., Wolf, F. J., . . . Mochales, S. (1969). Phosphonomycin, a New Antibiotic Produced by Strains of Streptomyces. Science, 166(3901), 122-123. doi: 10.1126/science.166.3901.122
5. Brenner, K., You, L., & Arnold, F. H. (2008). Engineering microbial consortia: a new frontier in synthetic biology. Trends in Biotechnology, 26(9), 483-489. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2008.05.004
6. Rittmann, B. E., et al. (2006). A vista for microbial ecology and environmental biotechnology. Environmental science & technology, 40(4), 1096-1103.