an environment-sensitive synthetic microbial ecosystem一个环境敏感性合成微生物生态系统.pdfVIP

An Environment-Sensitive Synthetic Microbial Ecosystem Bo Hu, Jin Du, Rui-yang Zou, Ying-jin Yuan* Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering, Ministry of Education and Department of Pharmaceutical Engineering, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China Abstract Microbial ecosystems have been widely used in industrial production, but the inter-relationships of organisms within them haven’t been completely clarified due to complex composition and structure of natural microbial ecosystems. So it is challenging for ecologists to get deep insights on how ecosystems function and interplay with surrounding environments. But the recent progresses in synthetic biology show that construction of artificial ecosystems where relationships of species are comparatively clear could help us further uncover the meadow of those tiny societies. By using two quorum-sensing signal transduction circuits, this research designed, simulated and constructed a synthetic ecosystem where various population dynamics formed by changing environmental factors. Coherent experimental data and mathematical simulation in our study show that different antibiotics levels and initial cell densities can result in correlated population dynamics such as extinction, obligatory mutualism, facultative mutualism and commensalism. This synthetic ecosystem provides valuable information for addressing questions in ecology and may act as a chassis for construction of more complex microbial ecosystems. Citation: Hu B, Du J, Zou R-y, Yuan Y-j (2010) An Environment-Sensitive Synthetic Microbial Ecosystem. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10619. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010619 Editor: Mark Isalan, Center for Genomic Regulation, Spain Received January 21, 2010; Accepted April 19, 2010; Published May 12, 2010 Copyright: