MicroEngine
INRAE HOLOFLUX
Description
MicroEngine : Using synthetic ecosystems as a chassis for microbiome engineering.
Microbiome engineering offers promising prospects for tackling a range of public health and environmental challenges. Bottom-up (strain-to-ecosystem) and top-down (ecosystem-to-strain) approaches can be used to create experimental systems for testing and acquiring new knowledge about microbiomes.
However, these approaches, adapted to driving microbial fluxes from one microbiome to another, have received little conceptual or experimental attention. We propose to study the possibility of such approaches for the flux between food and gut microbiomes.
The project involves a collaborative effort with several partners:
- Emile Auria and Nicolas Barraud from INRAE “Ferment du futur” Innovation Center
- Daniel Rios Garza and Theodore Bouchez from INRA PROSE
This project proposes to develop a ecological chassis,which enables a strain with a key functionality to be transported from one microbiome to another, using a combined top-down and bottom-up approach. The former will screen microbial collections in consortia to select the best potential chassis (Millidrop, Biolector), while the latter will use genome-scale metabolic modeling tools to optimize metabolic interactions.
MicroEngine is funded by INRAE HOLOFLUX