Environmental Synthetic Ecology (ESE)
Environmental synthetic ecology designs, builds, and manages living ecosystems—typically microbial consortia—to address real environmental challenges with precision and scalability. By integrating synthetic biology, ecology, and systems engineering, it creates stable, controllable communities that outperform single strains in complex settings. Applications span pollution cleanup, where division of metabolic labor enables degradation of persistent contaminants; resource recovery, capturing nitrogen, phosphorus, and critical metals from wastewater and industrial effluents while producing valuable byproducts; and climate mitigation, via microalgae–bacteria systems for carbon capture, methane oxidation, and biomineralization for durable sequestration. It also supports water and soil health by suppressing pathogens and restoring ecosystem functions in agriculture and aquaculture, and enables in situ monitoring through living biosensors. Core methods include rational community design with complementary functional roles, genetic programming for inducible activity and safety, ecological stabilization through biofilms, encapsulation, and spatial structuring, and model-guided engineering that couples genome-scale and agent-based models with iterative lab-to-field scaling. Embedded in reactors, wetlands, filters, or living materials, these engineered consortia improve efficiency and selectivity at low contaminant concentrations, reduce energy and chemical inputs, and advance a circular economy by turning wastes into resources.
-
We provide knowledge and expertise on topics like:
- Water Engineering and Environmental Biotechnology
- Synthetic Community and Synthetic Ecology
- River-Reservoir Microbial Ecology Engineering
- Coastal pollution control
Principle Investigator: Di Wu