Synthetic Biology Group, MIT Synthetic Biology Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA 02139, USA; Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
JSR-Keio University Medical and Chemical Innovation Center (JKiC), JSR Corp., 35 Shinanomachi, Shinjuku, Tokyo 160-8582, Japan.
Curr Opin Chem Biol. 2022 Oct;70:102178. doi: 10.1016/j.cbpa.2022.102178. Epub 2022 Jun 24.
The role of the microbiome in health and disease is attracting the attention of researchers seeking to engineer microorganisms for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Recent progress in synthetic biology may enable the dissection of host-microbiota interactions. Sophisticated genetic circuits that can sense, compute, memorize, and respond to signals have been developed for the stable commensal bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, dominant in the human gut. In this review, we highlight recent advances in expanding the genetic toolkit for B. thetaiotaomicron and foresee several applications of this species for microbiome engineering. We provide our perspective on the challenges and future opportunities for the engineering of human gut-associated bacteria as living therapeutic agents.
微生物组在健康和疾病中的作用引起了研究人员的关注，他们正在寻求设计用于诊断和治疗应用的微生物。合成生物学的最新进展可能使宿主-微生物群相互作用的剖析成为可能。已经为在人类肠道中占主导地位的稳定共生菌拟杆菌(Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron)开发了能够感应、计算、记忆和响应信号的复杂遗传回路。在这篇综述中，我们强调了扩展 B. thetaiotaomicron 遗传工具包的最新进展，并预见了该物种在微生物组工程中的几种应用。我们提供了我们对作为活体治疗剂的人类肠道相关细菌的工程设计的挑战和未来机遇的看法。
