Synthetic biology could turn living cells into microscopic sentinels and catalysts that detect and clean up contaminated water. The UK’s Victorian-era water infrastructure is ageing, energy-hungry, and expensive to maintain. At the same time, the global market for water treatment technology is growing fast. This project aims to bridge the gap between laboratory breakthroughs in synthetic biology and real-world water engineering. The researchers will design synthetic organisms that act as sensors—signalling when pollutants are present—and as catalysts that break down toxins or help recover valuable byproducts from wastewater. If successful, the work could lead to self-regulating water treatment systems that require less energy and chemical input. For example, engineered biofilms could be made to form or dissolve on demand inside filtration membranes, improving efficiency. Minimal-cell architectures might detoxify water without the need for complex industrial processes. The project also includes studying how synthetic organisms behave in open microbial communities and exploring responsible governance of the technology. This is applied fundamental science. It does not promise a product tomorrow, but it could reshape how we maintain and upgrade the quiet infrastructure that delivers clean water to millions of homes.
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We propose to harness one of the most rapidly evolving frontiers in science, synthetic biology, to tackle one of the most pressing engineering problems, the supply and remediation of fresh water, in order to deliver innovative technologies into a rapidly expanding international market. Synthetic biology is an exciting and potentially transformative scientific endeavour with apparently limitless applications. This basic technology is now being developed in laboratories across the UK, with significant academic impact . The frontiers of the field are being pushed back rapidly and scaling up to real-world applications now presents a significant challenge and opportunity. In this respect, the design of technology for water supply and treatment is an area that urgently requires the innovation that synthetic biology promises. In the Developed World, the engineers of the industrial revolution bequeathed us magnificent water infrastructure. But it is now aged, faulty, expensive to maintain, costly to run, energy guzzling and, consequently, unsustainable. We will innovate in the basic-technology of synthetic biology to improve existing and create new biotechnologies for water supply and treatment focussing on two generic themes, namely: synthetic organisms as sentinels and signallers, and synthetic organisms as catalysts. The chip-to-lab-to-pilot scale water engineering technologies in drinking water systems, membrane filtration technologies, anaerobic digestion, microbial fuel cells and bioelectrochemical systems currently being developed in the Environmental Engineering group will provide robust environments to test new ideas. We will use synthetic organisms as sentinels and signallers to engineer the formation and dissolution of biofilms and to optimise the recovery of valuable products in the anaerobic treatment of wastewater. We will develop minimal cell architectures as catalysts in detoxifying water. We will quantify the dynamics of populations of synthetic organisms in open microbial communities and explore responsible innovation in synthetic biology and governance of the emerging technologies.
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