This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. This research will integrate approaches from many disciplines including biology, engineering, and physics to analyze and quantify the function of biological molecules important for long-distance electron transfer (LDET) in microbial communities. This research will span hierarchical scales studying how genes and proteins enable the assembly of filaments of bacterial cells that electronically interact with materials present in the environment. Insight into the genetic rules governing microbial LDET has implications for designing multicellular communities to maintain and regenerate nutrient cycles to address global scale challenges in agriculture and sustainability. Knowledge gained during this effort will also enable the construction of novel microbial electronics where cells with modular genetic programs can be coupled to electrodes using LDET through conductive cellular filaments. Additionally, the Fellow will develop an interactive Paper-based Organism Waste Energy Recovery (POWER) device to enable high school and undergraduate students to electronically interact with microbes. The POWER device will allow students to interrogate how different genetic programs alter electricity production and illustrate electrochemical and electrical engineering principles.
Microorganisms contribute to Earth-scale biogeochemical processes by regulating electron transfer across a range of spatial scales. Recently, bacteria living in aquatic sediments were discovered that perform LDET by forming filaments of thousands of cells spanning centimeter-scale redox gradients found in these environments. Thus far, it has not been possible to isolate and grow these ?cable bacteria? in pure culture. This challenge has limited the throughput of research on understanding the genetic rules governing this unique LDET phenotype. Using recently acquired cable bacteria genomic information and synthetic biology approaches, the Fellow plans to reconstruct cable bacteria phenotypes in a lab-tractable organism, Shewanella oneidensis MR-1, to begin testing the genetic components underlying this unique multicellular microbial phenotype. The Fellow will use synthetic biology approaches to program filament formation and train in electrochemical, scanning-probe, and spectroscopic techniques to examine intercellular electron transfer in these synthetic cables. This transformative, systems-based research project will establish the first sequence-function relationships of cable bacteria genes and will be the first step toward decoding the Rules of Life governing long-distance electron transfer.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
