Engineering Synthetic Biologic Marine Microorganisms for Biosensing in situ

The ability to study trophic strategies is limited in part by the ability to correlate changes in a transcriptome to changes in the environment. Synthetic biology presents an opportunity to develop transcriptional reporters for environmental perturbations. Specifically, biosensors enable the linking of the expression of a reporter gene to the presence of absence of specific metabolites and changes in population dynamics. This can enable the coupling of biochemical measurements to the understanding of trophic strategies and physiological adaptations among marine microorganisms.

However, most synthetic biosensors have been developed in model organisms where the ease of genetic manipulation facilitates their more rapid development of biosensing synthetic genetic constructs. Engineering a microbe endogenous to a marine environment enables the reporting on specific ecological niches and microbial population dynamics.

Here we report on our ongoing efforts to domesticate a suite of marine microorganisms for their use as in situ biosensors. We report on the rapid culturing of marine microbes in a laboratory environment and on our ability to transform marine microbes with synthetic genetic constructs. On going efforts include evaluating changes in activity of synthetic genetic constructs in different microorganism and on developing biosensing constructs that report on the availability of cryptic cycling compounds.

Back to: Coupling Meta’omics and Biochemical Measurements to Understand Trophic Strategies or Physiological Adaptations Among Marine Organisms (Micro to Macro) III Posters