Ceres

Conventional soil bioremediation is laborious, inefficient, and expensive, requiring soil preparation, nutrient delivery to remediating organisms, and continuous site monitoring. Plants and their rhizosphere microbiomes have innate potential to inexpensively perform the costliest aspects of bioremediation—soil preparation, nutrient augmentation, and site monitoring—without routine human intervention. Leveraging the inherent plant-rhizosphere community, Ceres will enhance community performance by engineering synthetic communities—SynComs—to achieve autonomous bioremediation of a fuel, JP-8, and an explosive, TNT, from soil while overtly reporting the status of this remediation. Advances in both synthetic biology and synthetic ecology will be used to create and optimize these sophisticated SynComs.
Categories: Science and Technology and other Research and Development.