Cyanobacteria engineering for restoring environments (CYBER)

Pollution is one of the most pressing global challenges of today, threatening our ecosystems, health, and wellbeing. Traditional approaches to environmental clean-up often fall short due to the complexity of deploying them at scale into natural environments. There is an urgent need to rethink our strategy.

This project aims to harness the potential of cyanobacteria - one of the oldest and most diverse organisms on Earth - to unlock new approaches. Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous in many environments and play a crucial role in basic ecosystem services due to their ability to fix nitrogen and perform photosynthesis. But despite a growing interest in the use of cyanobacteria for bioremediation, we currently lack reliable biological parts and experimental tools to safely reprogram cyanobacteria for this task.

In this project we propose a multidisciplinary effort to overcome these hurdles and make engineered cyanobacteria a feasible platform for restoration of degraded environments.

To archive this, our project is built around four specific objectives. First, we will aim to construct what we term "ecological wind tunnels". These artificial ecosystems that we can build in the lab, better mimic the complex spatial-temporal organization and interactions found in the real world.

By subjecting engineered organisms to these more realistic conditions, we can enhance their functionality, have greater confidence in their ability to perform in natural environments, and evaluate their ecological impact more accurately than in a typical lab setting. Second, we will use massively parallel assays and sequencing-based surveillance techniques, combined with rigorous measurements and advanced artificial intelligence, to facilitate the rapid development of biological tools for reprogramming cyanobacteria.

Third, to ensure the traceability of our engineered cells in natural environments and facilitate their safe deployment, we will develop approaches to "barcode" our organisms. This will enable us to better track their dispersal and establish ownership of the organisms in commercial contexts. Finally, as a case study, we will engineer cyanobacteria that are able to naturally absorb various pollutants from the environment and alter their biology to simplify their physical removal from the environment.

This ability to remove our engineered biology in a targeted way will help to reduce any long-term impact our cells have on a natural ecosystem by allowing them to only be present temporarily and not provide sufficient time for them to become embedded.

In addition to the science, we also recognise the crucial role of early engagement with society and policy makers around the acceptable use of this technology as it is developed. We have therefore partnered with a range of leading academics, companies, non-profit organisations, and funders to build a community and will hold inclusive events that connect our science to wider society and decision makers in government.

We aim to use this point of interaction to understand concerns, communicate evidence-based risks and benefits regarding the science, and explore possible routes towards the acceptable use of engineered biology in environmental contexts.

Together, the science and engagement performed in this project will help revolutionize pollution control strategies and kick-start new sustainable bio-based solutions to environmental restoration. It will also develop the crucial foundational tools and methods needed to de-risk the deployment of engineered biology into real-world ecosystems and help to establish cyanobacteria as a versatile and safe platform for tackling diverse environmental challenges.