Swenson W, Arendt J, Wilson D S
Department of Biological Sciences, Binghamton University, NY 13902-6000, USA.
Environ Microbiol. 2000 Oct;2(5):564-71. doi: 10.1046/j.1462-2920.2000.00140.x.
We present a method for selecting entire microbial ecosystems for bioremediation and other practical purposes. A population of ecosystems is established in the laboratory, each ecosystem is measured for a desired property (in our case, degradation of the environmental pollutant 3-chloroaniline), and the best ecosystems are used as 'parents' to inoculate a new generation of 'offspring' ecosystems. Over many generations of variation and selection, the ecosystems become increasingly well adapted to produce the desired property. The procedure is similar to standard artificial selection experiments except that whole ecosystems, rather than single individuals, are the units of selection. The procedure can also be understood in terms of complex system theory as a way of searching a vast combinatorial space (many thousands of microbial species and many thousands of genes within species) for combinations that are especially good at producing the desired property. Ecosystem-level selection can be performed without any specific knowledge of the species that comprise the ecosystems and can select ensembles of species that would be difficult to discover with more reductionistic methods. Once a 'designer ecosystem' has been created by ecosystem-level selection, reductionistic methods can be used to identify the component species and to discover how they interact to produce the desired effect.
我们提出了一种为生物修复及其他实际目的选择完整微生物生态系统的方法。在实验室中建立一系列生态系统，针对每个生态系统测量一种期望特性（在我们的案例中是对环境污染物3-氯苯胺的降解能力），并将最佳的生态系统用作“亲本”来接种新一代的“子代”生态系统。经过多代的变异和选择，这些生态系统越来越能适应产生期望的特性。该过程类似于标准的人工选择实验，只不过选择的单位是整个生态系统而非单个个体。从复杂系统理论的角度来看，该过程也可理解为一种在巨大的组合空间（数千种微生物物种以及物种内数千个基因）中搜索特别擅长产生期望特性的组合的方式。生态系统层面的选择无需对构成生态系统的物种有任何具体了解，并且能够选择出用更简化方法难以发现的物种组合。一旦通过生态系统层面的选择创建了“定制生态系统”，就可以使用简化方法来识别组成物种，并发现它们如何相互作用以产生期望的效果。
