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Team:British Columbia
From 2012.igem.org
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Synthetic Syntrophy
The field of synthetic biology has seen the development of many biological monocultures capable of performing a wide range of novel functions. In contrast to this current paradigm, microbes have naturally evolved to survive as members of dynamic communities with distributed metabolism. This “divide and conquer” strategy allows the community to perform more complicated metabolic processing than would be possible in single microorganisms while being resilient to environmental changes. Despite very recent proof of concepts in developing model microbial consortia, or synthetic ecology, questions remain as to whether complex metabolic pathways can be engineered in context of microbial populations. The 2012 University of British Columbia iGEM team sets a precedent by engineering a tunable consortium with a distributed 4S desulfurization pathway for increased efficiency in the removal of organosulfurs in heavy oils and bitumen resources.Foundational Advance: Engineering Microbial Consortia
Synthetic biologists have created systems for bio-sensing, bio-degradation, bio-transformation and bio-synthesis.
In nature, microbes normally exist within communities (consortia), where metabolic pathways are distributed across different species.
We hypothesize that distributing metabolic pathways in the field of synthetic biology may proffer separate advantages compared to engineering a single microbe containing an entire independent metabolism. For instance, distributing pathways can (i) reduce the metabolic burden on any one microbe and (ii) increase compartmentalization so that there is reduced cross-talk regulation/feedback inhibition and each reaction is sequestered within a more conducive cellular environment.
