Characterizing chemical signaling between engineered “microbial sentinels” in porous microplates
Name
Molecular Systems Biology - 2022 - Vaiana - Characterizing chemical signaling between engineered microbial sentinels in.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.15 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e9471787753c6ec7252424afa6b4b73b
Author(s)
Vaiana, Christopher A
Kim, Hyungseok
Cottet, Jonathan
Oai, Keiko
Ge, Zhifei
Conforti, Kameron
King, Andrew M
Meyer, Adam J
Chen, Haorong
Voigt, Christopher A
Date Issued
2022
Journal
Molecular Systems Biology
Publisher
EMBO
Citation
Vaiana, Christopher A, Kim, Hyungseok, Cottet, Jonathan, Oai, Keiko, Ge, Zhifei et al. 2022. "Characterizing chemical signaling between engineered “microbial sentinels” in porous microplates." Molecular Systems Biology, 18 (3).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Living materials combine a material scaffold, that is often porous, with engineered cells that perform sensing, computing, and biosynthetic tasks. Designing such systems is difficult because little is known regarding signaling transport parameters in the material. Here, the development of a porous microplate is presented. Hydrogel barriers between wells have a porosity of 60% and a tortuosity factor of 1.6, allowing molecular diffusion between wells. The permeability of dyes, antibiotics, inducers, and quorum signals between wells were characterized. A "sentinel" strain was constructed by introducing orthogonal sensors into the genome of Escherichia coli MG1655 for IPTG, anhydrotetracycline, L-arabinose, and four quorum signals. The strain's response to inducer diffusion through the wells was quantified up to 14 mm, and quorum and antibacterial signaling were measured over 16 h. Signaling distance is dictated by hydrogel adsorption, quantified using a linear finite element model that yields adsorption coefficients from 0 to 0.1 mol m-3 . Parameters derived herein will aid the design of living materials for pathogen remediation, computation, and self-organizing biofilms.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.15252/MSB.202110785
