Flagship6 - Bioengineering microbes and microbiomes

Bioengineering microbes and microbiomes represents a broad area of bioengineering to interrogate and harness different aspects of the microbial world as a new source of therapeutic and diagnostic functions. The expertise of Helmholtz scientists spans efforts to establish systematic approaches for the analysis of bacteria inside well-controllable microfluidic habitats, genetically modify non-model bacteria and engineer bacterial chasses as therapeutic probiotics as well as tailor microbial cell factories for the production of small-molecule therapeutics and environmental sensors. AI-based approaches will accelerate direct image acquisition, cell segmentation, bacterial tracking within microfluidic systems and the prediction of biosynthetic gene clusters and their biosynthetic products. Our technologies include microfluidic devices to cultivate and monitor difficult-to-culture bacteria and microbial consortia as well as applying systematic approaches to achieve DNA transformation and CRISPR-based editing in diverse non-model bacteria. Another promising area with significant societal impact is the exploration of uncharted biosynthetic pathways and their end products as a new source for future compounds and accelerated drug discovery.