Control of density and composition in an engineered two-member bacterial community

Title	Control of density and composition in an engineered two-member bacterial community
Authors	Reed D. McCardell, Ayush Pandey and Richard M. Murray
Source	Submitted, 2019 Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution and Design (SEED) Conference
Abstract	As studies continue to demonstrate how our health is related to the status of our various commensal microbiomes, synthetic biologists are developing tools and approaches to control these microbiomes and stabilize healthy states or remediate unhealthy ones. Building on previous work to control bacterial communities, we have constructed a synthetic two-member bacterial consortium engineered to reach population density and composition steady states set by inducer inputs. We detail a screening strategy to search functional parameter space in this high-complexity genetic circuit as well as initial testing of a functional two-member circuit. We demonstrate non-independent changes in total population density and composition steady states with a limited set of varying inducer concentrations. After a dilution to perturb the system from its steady state, density and composition steady states are not regained. Modeling and simulation suggest a need for increased degradation of intercellular signals to improve circuit performance. Future experiments will implement increased signal degradation and investigate the robustness of control of each characteristic to perturbations from steady states.
Type	Conference paper
URL	https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/632174v1
DOI	10.1101/632174
Tag	MPM19-seed
ID	2019b
Funding	DARPA BioCon
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