This NSF award by the Biotechnology, Biochemical and Biomass Engineering program supports work to use a systems biology framework to understand the behavior of an engineered ecosystem. The ecosystem is a wastewater treatment process designed to biologically remove phosphorus from sewage in order to protect surface waters from excessive nutrient inputs. The organisms responsible for phosphorus removal (called Accumulibacter) use a unique and complex metabolism that is poorly understood. In this project, we will use novel techniques based in meta-omics to study gene expression at the level of the entire bacterial community in a laboratory scale wastewater treatment system. The integrative and holistic approach provided by systems biology will allow us to understand how different species of Accumulibacter regulate their biochemical pathways to maximize phosphorus removal from water. Finally, we will construct a computational model that can predict how the Accumulibacter metabolism functions under normal and perturbed conditions. This understanding will improve our ability to predict when and why wastewater treatment systems fail, but it will also serve as a powerful case study in the application of systems biology tools to bacterial communities that are engineered using ecological principles.
