A transmission electron micrograph of Sinorhizobium meliloti strain 1021. The scale bar represents 2 microns. (George diCenzo)
Modern genetic techniques have allowed us to begin manipulating bacteria for societal gains, such as increasing their ability to produce biofuels or to remediate contaminated environments. Unfortunately, our ability to understand how bacterial communities perform these activities, and thus our ability to engineer them, is limited due to a lack of knowledge of the functional properties of microbes and their genes. We will use a high-throughput approach to help fill-in these gaps in knowledge, laying a solid foundation for researchers hoping to engineer bacteria with improved or novel traits.
Proposer: George diCenzo, Queen’s University (Canada)
Proposal: Constructing a functional and regulatory gene atlas of a nitrogen-fixing legume symbiont to instruct genome annotation and synthetic biology applications