Development of synthetic bacterial quorum communication systems for bacillus subtilis

Quorum communication is a method employed by bacteria, utilising small sender molecules and their associated sensing machinery, to orchestrate a unilateral population wide response based on population density and time. Much research has been undertaken into researching and engineering gram negative systems, whereas little work has been conducted into researching the gram positive sytems. We are seeking to engineer and characterise the behavioural nature of a wild type gram positive system through a modular synthetic biology approach. Furthermore, we aim to engineer a set of matched quorum sensing sender-receiver variants of this wild type system which are orthogonal to the natural system and each other.