Synthetic Biology for Terraformation Lessons from Mars, Earth, and the Microbiome

Abstract

What is the potential for synthetic biology as a way of engineering, on a large scale, complex ecosystems? Can it be used to change endangered ecological communities and rescue them to prevent their collapse? What are the best strategies for such ecological engineering paths to succeed? Is it possible to create stable, diverse synthetic ecosystems capable of persisting in closed environments? Can synthetic communities be created to thrive on planets different from ours? These and other questions pervade major future developments within synthetic biology. The goal of engineering ecosystems is plagued with all kinds of technological, scientific and ethic problems. In this paper, we consider the requirements for terraformation, i.e., for changing a given environment to make it hospitable to some given class of life forms. Although the standard use of this term involved strategies for planetary terraformation, it has been recently suggested that this approach could be applied to a very different context: ecological communities within our own planet. As discussed here, this includes multiple scales, from the gut microbiome to the entire biosphere.

Reflections on the 2nd International Congress on NanoBioEngineering 2020

“…Four motivating keynotes complemented the thematic area on environment and bioeconomy with powerful messages. Conde-Pueyo et al presented his keynote Bioremediation at a global scale from Petri dish to planet earth, where he discussed the different techniques and processes that have been developed at the interface of synthetic biology and nanotechnology toward the development of synthetic complex ecosystems that can be harnessed to perform diverse biological activities and if isolated, capable of creating their own closed environments and thrive under isolated synthetic conditions generated on earth; this has important applications to design and manipulate environments, such as those found in outer worlds, to create conditions hospitable to a specific lifeform (Conde-Pueyo et al, 2020 ). Next, François et al discussed the challenges to cost-effective production from renewable carbon sources.…”

Synthetic soil crusts against green-desert transitions: a spatial model

“…More recently, ecosystem terraformation has been suggested as a novel approach against green-desert shifts [55][56][57][58][59]. In a nutshell, some existing microorganisms in a degraded ecosystem, such as cyanobacteria of the soil crust, could be minimally modified by means of synthetic biology techniques royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R. Soc.…”

“…More recently, ecosystem terraformation has been suggested as a novel approach against green-desert shifts [ 55 – 59 ]. In a nutshell, some existing microorganisms in a degraded ecosystem, such as cyanobacteria of the soil crust, could be minimally modified by means of synthetic biology techniques to help improve soil moisture and create a cooperative feedback between vegetation or moss cover (see [ 60 ]) and the soil microbiome [ 61 ].…”

Habitat loss causes long transients in small trophic chains

“…In these ecosystems, the aridity restricts the availability to water, narrowing the vegetation cover. Moreover, external pressures like grazing or deforestation have shown that for the same aridity levels two possibilities are possible, vegetated or desert [28,29]. In lower levels of aridity multiple ecosystems can be observed (savanna, forest, grasslands, and shrublands) but for some levels of aridity abrupt changes occur [30].…”