title: Engineering multicellular logic in bacteria with metabolic wires.
abstract: Aromatic biodegradation pathways of environmental bacteria are vast sources of matching trios of enzymes, substrates and regulators that can be refactored to run logic operations through cell-to-cell communication. As a proof of concept, the connection between two Pseudomonas putida strains using benzoic acid as the wiring molecule is presented. In this system, a sender strain harboring the TOL pathway for biodegradation of aromatics processed toluene as input and generated benzoate as the output signal. Diffusion of such metabolic intermediate to the medium was then sensed by a second strain (the receiver) that used benzoate as input for a new logic gate producing a visual output (i.e., light emission). The setup was functional irrespective of whether sender and receiver cells were in direct contact or in liquid culture. These results highlight the potential of environmental metabolic pathways as sources of building blocks for the engineering of multicellular logic in prokaryotic systems.
authors.affiliation: Systems Biology Program, Centro Nacional de Biotecnología CSIC , Cantoblanco-Madrid, 28049 Spain.
authors.forename: Rafael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Silva-Rocha
authors.forename: Victor
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: de Lorenzo
mesh_terms: D001565:Benzoates / Q000378:metabolism; D001673:Biodegradation, Environmental; D002450:Cell Communication; D005818:Genetic Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D053858:Metabolic Networks and Pathways; D011401:Promoter Regions, Genetic; D016958:Pseudomonas putida / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism*; D014050:Toluene / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D001565:Benzoates; D014050:Toluene