Work is beginning on an industry-inspired testbed that aims to construct an advanced fermentation organism. Led by Chris Voigt, the new testbed aims to apply research from the SynBERC thrusts (parts, devices, chassis) to the construction of a “smart” strain that can be programmed to sense and respond to conditions encountered during a fermentation. The focus will be on the construction of a generic system that is applicable to many potential pathways. E. coli has been chosen as the model system because of the availability of platform parts/devices and genome replacement tools.

“We envision the development and characterization of sensors that can respond to different environmental conditions and common stresses encountered in a fermenter,” says Voigt. “This will involve both the construction of new sensors as well as the characterization of existing ones such that they can be integrated into a larger network.” The testbed will construct genetic circuits that enable the integration of potentially dozens of sensors (e.g., oxygen, temperature, glucose, pH, acetate, growth phase), which in turn control metabolic pathways and stress responses as outputs. For example, genetic circuits would be designed to convert an osmolarity step change into a dynamic response. Timers and adaptive circuits will enable the control over the expression of multiple genes at different times during fermentation. Voigt also forsees the development of a safe, phage-resistant chassis whose central metabolism is optimized for industrial applications and comes with the mathematical tool kit to rapidly insert new functional pathways.