Engineering the Human Microbiome Shows Promise for Treating Disease

In the not too distant future each of us will be able to colonize our gut with genetically modified “smart” bacteria that detect and stamp out disease at the earliest possible moment. This scenario may sound like the premise for a sci-fi flick, but it is a very real possibility. Microbiome engineering holds great promise because of advances in the field of synthetic biology, which strives to create and rewire biological organisms so they perform desired tasks. Synthetic biologists are attempting to turn bacterial cells into the biological equivalent of the silicon wafer. These principles have been primarily applied to organisms for biofuel production, but the resulting techniques and genetic tool kit, when applied to our resident microbes, will have profound consequences for human health.

These resident microbes are adept at sensing what food is present, whether any pathogens are lurking and what the inflammatory state of the gut is—their survival depends on it. The model gut-resident bacterial species that we are using in our laboratory for initial tests, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, possesses more than 100 genetic circuits...