In-field stand-off detection of signals emitted from engineered environmental bacteria for agriculture applications

During the past years, synthetic biology developed a language in which cells are programmed to perform tasks for a wide range of applications such as therapeutics, material, energy and agriculture. Specifically, in the agriculture area, it is envisaged to monitor environmental changes by engineering bacteria and plants to sense chemical changes. Nevertheless, a remained challenge would be to apply such capabilities outside the lab for real-world conditions. A common way to tackle such a challenge is to microencapsulate bacteria within materials that can shield them from the external environment and still allow exchanges to occur on a molecular basis. Here we are using mini-ICE genome editing technology – a synthetic engineering platform for integrating genes into genomes of undomesticated bacteria. We are taking undomesticated bacteria from their natural environment, engineer and return them to the identical environment with almost no effect on their fitness and their ability to survive. We have successfully engineered a GFP reporting system to be active in undomesticated soil bacteria taken from different locations in Israel using the mini-ICE technology and identified them using NGS. We are now engineering different reporting systems like volatile gases e.g. methyl halides and isoamyl acetate for working with mini-ICE technology and the undomesticated bacteria and testing the systems both in the lab and in the bacteria natural environments to check for survivability and reporting activity. Having such reporters and real environment experiments will enable us to engineer genetic circuits as a synthetic bacterial program that sense and repair our environment.