NSF Award
2409648
PART 1: NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY<br/><br/>This research aims to develop new biomaterials and tools to cultivate microorganisms and study them in conditions that closely mimic the environment in which they naturally grow. Current methods rarely do this, so scientists study microbes that can grow and not those present but unable to grow in nonnatural conditions. Therefore, most microorganisms are poorly studied, even if known to exist. This has impeded the scientific discovery of novel materials made by microorganisms that have potential applications in health care, environmental remediation, or industrial use. In this research, microbes isolated from various natural sources will be enclosed in capsules that are smaller than the width of a hair. The composition of capsule will be designed to facilitate the growth of the microbial species enclosed and their communication with the outside environment. This new ‘nanoculture system’ will be used to study how the enclosed microbial communities communicate and interact with ‘outside’ microorganisms a natural environment, like that in the gastrointestinal track. This will be tested by feeding the encapsulated microbes to mice without gut microbes and determining if the nanoculture system can restore gastrointestinal health. The results of this research will result in new capabilities to grow microorganisms and develop new materials from these understudied microbes with potential to restore balance to the gut’s microbiomes. The project will expose high school students to the field of biotechnology and develop their technical skills and seed their professional networks as strategies to inspire future careers in this area.<br/><br/>PART 2: TECHNICAL SUMMARY<br/><br/>This research aims to harness a microfluidic-based technique to develop a multifunctional nanoculture system as a high-throughput assessment tool for microbial community dynamics. The nanocultures are nanoliter cultures made of poly(dimethylsiloxane) membranes, which can be manipulated for tunable permeability. The mechanical, transport, and magnetic properties of the nanocultures can facilitate the long-term storage and incubation of the microbial communities in environmental conditions. The nanocultures are thus microdevices capable of eliminating growth rate bias associated with interspecies competition and preserving microbes against biological and chemical insults. The soft-shelled microcapsules can harbor, culture, and store a multitude of microbes for purposes including community dynamics study, growth of challenging species, and the delivery of defined communities for microbiome restoration. A technology will be built to sequester and monitor the dynamics of synthetic or defined microbial consortia in environmental conditions. Specifically, a functional housing will be designed to characterize the unintended ecological impacts of the synthetic communities and to investigate the advantages of their controlled delivery in manipulating various microbiomes. The feasibility of the functional nanocultures for delivering a probiotic producing IL-2 in a mouse model of total body irradiation will be determined. The intellectual merit stems from the body of knowledge that the proposed work seeks to generate. Upon completion of the proposed research, we expect to have vertically advanced microbial-based technology by providing an alternative strategy to quickly and reliably assess the persistence, stability, and safe delivery of a synthetic community capable of impacting microbiomes relevant to human health. Finally, the proposed project is a transformative education model that will engage students and faculty from underrepresented groups. It will promote activities to help students develop new technical skills, participate in conferences, craft their professional development plan, and help 9-12 and undergraduate students embrace the STEM career.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
