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.
Highlights
Microbial ecosystem has increasingly draw our attention for its pivotal roles in the maintenance of Earth’s biosphere and sustaining life [1,2]
Environmental factors have constantly been regarded as significant elements in deciding persistence and evolution of ecosystems [36], especially for natural ecosystems which are increasingly subjected to human disruption [37,38]
Sharing some similarities with previous engineering ecosystems which facilitates the elucidation of complex population dynamics and interspecies interactions of natural ecosystem, such as the predator-prey model by Arnold’s group, this study is novel in considering environmental factors as key influence on ecosystem development which has been emphasized by some synthetic biologists[27]
Summary
Microbial ecosystem has increasingly draw our attention for its pivotal roles in the maintenance of Earth’s biosphere and sustaining life [1,2] It has great application potential in the production of new-generation bioenergy [3,4], sewage treatment (Rittman, 2006) and serving as medical targets for intestinal diseases [5]. Pioneer advances of synthetic biology proved ecological dynamics could be duplicated on synthetic systems which have many similarities with their natural counterpart, poor understandings of environmental influence extremely constrained its further application. This issue is what was stressed in the second wave of development of synthetic biology [31]
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