Building Synthetic Microbial Communities for Biology, Mitigating Climate Change, Sustainability and Biotechnology (Synthetic Communities)

Microbes and communities of microbes have remarkable diversity, allowing them to flourish in environments all over the planet and in a variety of substrates and hosts. Given their relative importance to ecosystems around the world, to the economy and to health, researchers have studied microbial systems extensively and have a better understanding of their capabilities and impacts on hosts and the environment. In recent years, researchers have turned to synthetic microbial communities, which are less complex and better defined than natural systems and used them to address fundamental biological questions as well as a range of societal problems.

This solicitation seeks projects that use a model synthetic microbial community to better understand the formation, maintenance or functionality of natural communities and to understand a natural community’s impact on the host, when applicable. This solicitation also seeks projects that create synthetic communities with novel capabilities and aim to understand the biological underpinnings for these novel capabilities. Projects that address fundamental biological principles at any scale, from the molecular to the ecosystem scale, are welcome. Ultimately, this solicitation aims to build a comprehensive biological knowledge base that scientists can use to rationally design synthetic microbial communities with novel applications in climate resiliency, sustainability, biotechnology, and biomanufacturing.