Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
17
CHAPTER
Applications of Engineered
Synthetic Ecosystems
Harris H. Wang
1,
, Michael T. Mee
3,4
and George M. Church
2,3
1
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
2
Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA
3
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA,USA
4
Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
INTRODUCTION
A major goal in synthetic biology is to construct biological systems with robust and
controllable behavior and functionality.
1
Over recent decades, biologists have tried to
deconvolve the complexity of life by elucidating key genetic and regulatory determinants,
with the hope of eventually engineering biological systems in more predictable ways.
Genetic circuits have now been designed and rewired with relative ease to produce
interesting and useful cellular phenotypes.
2
A natural extension of this bioengineering
framework is the combination of different cells into groups and artificial consortia of
increasing complexity.
3
This approach is important, since heterogeneous populations can
often outperform homogeneous populations of genetically identical individuals in many
tasks that require more sophisticated divisions of labor.
4,5
Natural microbial consortia, for
example, are able to degrade complex substrates more efficiently than any single member
can.
6
Furthermore, mixed populations are more robust to environmental variations,
7
and
can potentially be reprogrammed in modular ways. However, building higher-order
biological systems relies on improving our understanding of the ecology of dynamic
multicomponent communities, both natural and synthetic. The area of synthetic ecology is
poised to grow in this endeavor.
317
Just like the age-old tradition of brewing using yeast, we have a history of successes utilizing
microbial consortium, albeit crudely, for applications such as composting and waste
treatment.
8,9
Coupling biodegradation of complex feedstocks to bioproduction of useful
products is also achievable.
10,11
However, attempts to optimize these processes rely on
treating natural communities naïvely as black-box operations, because we do not
understand much of the underlying design principles and constraints needed to engineer
microbial communities. Furthermore, individual cells have their own growth objectives,
subject to Darwinian selection, that often do not align with human-designed synthetic
objectives such as overproduction of metabolically expensive compounds.
12
These authors contributed equally to this work.
