Temperature regulation as a tool to program synthetic microbial community composition

Abstract Engineering of synthetic microbial communities is emerging as a powerful new paradigm for performing various industrially, medically, and environmentally important processes. To reach the fullest potential, however, this approach requires further development in many aspects, a key one being regulating the community composition. Here we leverage well‐established mechanisms in ecology which govern the relative abundance of multispecies ecosystems and develop a new tool for programming the composition of synthetic microbial communities. Using a simple model system consisting of two microorganisms Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas putida , which occupy different but partially overlapping thermal niches, we demonstrated that temperature regulation could be used to enable coexistence and program the community composition. We first investigated a constant temperature regime and showed that different temperatures led to different community compositions. Next, we invented a new cycling temperature regime and showed that it can dynamically tune the microbial community, achieving a wide range of compositions depending on parameters that are readily manipulatable. Our work provides conclusive proof of concept that temperature regulation is a versatile and powerful tool capable of programming compositions of synthetic microbial communities.