Design and implementation of programmable environmental response-actuator systems using bacteria

The Thinking Soils project is about designing and building bacteria to sense the environment and respond to it accordingly. Bacteria response to a stress change relies on a complex regulatory system that includes transcription, translation, protein phosphorylation, allosteric regulation, ligand/receptor binding, and enzymatic reactions. With synthetic biology modular functional design, it is possible to engineer the response to a specific type of stress.

In this talk, I will describe how we try to design a synthetic biological system to act as a sensor capable of detecting a change in environmental stress, and respond by producing new materials. In particular, I will discuss the synthetic biology approach to finding pressure sensitive promoters, and to building a response-actuator system.