Using synthetic biology to engineer bacterial cellulose to improve its industrial applications

The production and usage of biomaterials is no new feat for humanity. We have constantly used the natural resources around us to progress as a species but now that we enter a more advanced age the reliance on primitive biomaterials and their extraction methods has started to become a threat to the way of life to our species. The unsustainable production of materials for use has led us to a resource and climate crisis and the need for more sustainable, renewable, and smarter biomaterials has become one of the priorities for our research and development sectors. Utilising Synthetic Biology and its tools to engineer novel biomaterials has recently started to progress. Engineering microorganisms to synthesis materials that can be used for applications such as sensing-and-responding to their environment to having unique filtration properties able to purify contaminated water sources has recently been achieved. Bacteria from the Acetobacter genus know to produce a biomaterial called bacterial cellulose (BC) have been of increasing interest. One specific Acetobacter species named Komagateaibacter rhaeticus iGEM is a model bacterial cellulose producing organism and is able to synthesis copious amounts of this biomaterial. As it is a genetically amenable strain it allows us to engineer in functionalities and increase the amounts of BC that the organism can produce making it a smarter, engineerable, living biomaterial. In this work we have set out to apply Synthetic Biology principles to K. rhaeticus iGEM strain. By metabolically engineering this organism to overexpress a number of genes in bacterial cellulose synthesis pathway and the fructose utilisation pathway we were able to increase the yield of BC produced by K. rhaeticus. Additionally, we investigated the secretome of the organism in order to utilise its native Sec and Tat secretion pathways in order to secrete reporter proteins to achieve proof-of-concept of the ability to functionalise BC using K. rhaeticus as a secretion platform. This would provide the basis for future work in which one could grow a functional biomaterial capable of bioremediation, biosensing and wound repair with a reduced burden on current energy demanding processes and at both a low and high scale depending on the needs of the situation.