NSF Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr)

NSF 精密微生物组工程研究中心 (PreMiEr)

• 批准号: 2133504
• 负责人: Claudia Gunsch
• 金额: $ 2600万
• 依托单位: Duke University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Cooperative Agreement
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-09-01 至 2027-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2133504&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NSF; Engineering; Research; Center; Precision

Microbes have colonized and adapted to most every environment on Earth, including the built environments that humans have created, such as the homes where we live and the pipes that bring us drinking water. It has been well established that microbial communities, or microbiomes, that colonize people have a direct influence on human health. The microbiome of the built environment, in particular, has gained increasing recognition for its key role in human health through its interaction with the human microbiome. However, despite this knowledge, no systematic infrastructure exists to decipher how microbial systems adapt to and grow within built environments, impeding our ability to diagnose built environment health and harness the power inherent to those microbiomes. The Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) will create microbiome-based diagnostic tools and develop microbiome engineering approaches to monitor and operate built environments that maximize human health protection. Informed by societal needs and research-stakeholder teams, PreMiEr’s research design will work to prevent the spread of infectious agents, promote the colonization of beneficial microorganisms, and lead to strategies for controlling pandemics and antibiotic resistance—phenomena that have led to over six million deaths worldwide (as of June 2022) and cost the global economy an estimated $8 trillion in the last year alone. Integral to its research vision, PreMiEr will create diverse and inclusive interdisciplinary research and training hubs where engineers, microbiologists, social scientists, and ethicists work alongside theorists, model builders, and computational scientists to develop technologies that enable transformative engineering discoveries in safe, sustainable and responsible ways.Our capacity to engineer microbiomes requires a fundamental understanding of concepts of community ecology and an ability to track, control, and model those interactions. To apply microbiome engineering to real-world systems, community level interactions must be integrated into a comprehensive, scalable modeling framework that requires iterative evaluation and validation in model testbeds. PreMiEr’s research organization is designed to generate fundamental understanding across these levels and functionalities, culminating in the development of a framework that enables the biodesign of smart and healthy built environments. PreMiEr will leverage advances in high-throughput genomic sequencing, high-resolution mass spectrometry, computational performance, and statistical modeling to unravel previously unknown mechanistic interactions. Enabling technologies will be developed to detect and define interactions in the built environment, including approaches that probe microbial dark matter for the development of built-environment health diagnostic tools; methods for targeted delivery of desired genetic features and microbial vectors; tools for fine in situ functional tuning; and predictive scalable statistical microbiome engineering models that consider high dimensionality, sparsity, and heterogeneity. These new technology elements will enable us to test hypotheses related to microbiome assembly and function. Importantly, by incorporating social scientists and ethicists into PreMiEr’s research framework, non-social scientists’ work will be informed by consideration of the ethical, societal, and policy implications of their microbiome engineering discoveries. Through rigorous evaluation and iterative refinement of curricula, and institutional practices designed to support a culture of convergence and the dissemination of findings, PreMiEr will contribute to best practices in domestic training. The PreMiEr ERC will include targeted recruitment of trainees from underrepresented groups, building upon existing partnerships with our nation’s largest HBCU, and will provide immersion in research and training at the interface of multiple disciplines to address complex challenges. PreMiEr will train the next generation of diverse and highly motivated engineers and scientists in technical and professional skills to compete in the emerging arenas of microbial science and engineering. Ultimately, our work will advance collaborations and discovery focused on environmental microbiomes to engineer healthy built environments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

微生物已经在地球上的几乎所有环境中定居并适应，包括人类创造的建筑环境，例如我们居住的房屋和为我们提供饮用水的管道。众所周知，微生物群落或微生物群落。尤其是，建筑环境中的微生物组通过与人类微生物组的相互作用在人类健康中发挥着关键作用，这一点已得到越来越多的认可。破译如何微生物系统适应建筑环境并在其中生长，阻碍了我们诊断建筑环境健康和利用这些微生物组固有的力量的能力，精密微生物组工程研究中心（PreMiEr）将创建基于微生物组的诊断工具并开发微生物组工程方法。监测和运营建筑环境，最大限度地保护人类健康 根据社会需求和研究利益相关者团队的信息，PreMiEr 的研究设计将致力于防止传染性病原体的传播，促进有益菌的定殖。微生物，并导致控制流行病和抗生素耐药性的策略，这些现象已导致全球超过 600 万人死亡（截至 2022 年 6 月），仅去年一年就给全球经济造成了约 8 万亿美元的损失。 PreMiEr 将创建多元化和包容性的跨学科研究和培训中心，工程师、微生物学家、社会科学家和伦理学家与理论家、模型构建者和计算科学家一起开发技术，以安全、可持续的方式实现变革性工程发现我们设计微生物组的能力需要对群落生态学的概念有基本的了解，并具有跟踪、控制和建模这些相互作用的能力。为了将微生物组工程应用到现实世界的系统中，必须将群落层面的相互作用整合到一个全面的系统中。 ，需要在模型测试台中进行迭代评估和验证的可扩展建模框架旨在对这些级别和功能产生基本理解，最终开发出一个能够实现智能健康建筑环境的生物设计的框架。 PreMiEr 将利用高通量基因组测序、高分辨率质谱、计算性能和统计建模方面的进步来揭示以前未知的机械相互作用，并将开发检测和定义建筑环境中相互作用的技术，包括探测微生物的方法。用于开发建筑环境健康诊断工具的暗物质；用于精细原位功能调整的有针对性的传递方法；以及考虑高维度的预测性可扩展统计微生物组工程模型；这些新技术元素将使我们能够测试与微生物组组装和功能相关的假设，通过将社会科学家和伦理学家纳入 PreMiEr 的研究框架，非社会科学家的工作将通过考虑伦理、通过严格评估和迭代完善课程以及旨在支持融合文化和传播研究结果的制度实践，PreMiEr 将了解其微生物组工程发现的社会和政策影响。 PreMiEr ERC 将在与我国最大的 HBCU 的现有合作伙伴关系的基础上，有针对性地从代表性不足的群体中招募学员，并将提供沉浸式多学科交叉的研究和培训，以应对复杂的挑战。 PreMiEr 将培训下一代多元化且积极进取的工程师和科学家的技术和专业技能，以在新兴的微生物科学和工程领域竞争，最终，我们的工作将促进以环境微生物组为重点的合作和发现。设计健康的建筑环境。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。