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Adventures in multispecies synthetic biology
In Nature species do not live in isolation and they often collaborate to accomplish sophisticated biochemical tasks. Examples include the human gut microbiome, where diverse bacteria catalyse hundreds of different reactions in the breakdown of food (and also interact with and influence human physiology) and various environmental niches where species work in concert to break down food sources. Synthetic biology, engineering biological systems for a user defined purposes, has recently started to move beyond its initial ‘monoculture' applications to those involving multiple species. In this talk, I will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities in multispecies synthetic biology focusing on two examples from ongoing work- bacterial-mammalian cell systems for biomanufacturing and bacterial-plant systems for phytoremediation. While we are still a long way away from the complex ecosystems of the natural world, it is possible to build synthetic biology systems involving species from different kingdoms that can perform biotechnological functions.