Systems and Synthetic Biology in Hydrocarbon

Microbiology: Tools
Vı́ctor de Lorenzo

Abstract
Systems and synthetic biology represent the two sides of the recent ambition to understand quantitatively
biological systems as full, logically organized objects able to perform functions on the basis of their extant
blueprint and therefore amenable to being refactored to generate new-to-nature properties. The systemic
approach focuses on the cataloguing of all components of the studied entity, their relational logic and their
dynamic interplay for comprehending and predicting its behaviour as a whole. The synthetic counterpart
adopts straight engineering principles taken from industrial and electric manufacturing for re-creating
biological systems from perfectly defined constituents as well as for constructing functionalities that have
not yet emerged through the natural evolutionary course.

Keywords: Containment, DNA assembly, Modelling, Networks, Orthogonality, Parts

1 Systems and Synthetic Biology Meet Environmental Biotechnology

The biological world is an extraordinary case of multi-scale com-

plexity in which every layer of the system (from single genes or
proteins up to whole landscapes) seems to be connected both
upstream and downstream to other autonomous layers of intricacy
and interdependence [1]. The challenge in this scenario is that
understanding the rules that govern one level of functioning
(say, the way one biodegradation pathway is regulated in a single
bacterium in a Petri dish) may tell us very little on the next layer
(e.g. whether the same strain/pathway has any significance in
degrading the same compound in a natural niche). The phenome-
non so pervasive in complex systems (and therefore in biology)
known as emergence means that the combination of discrete
components of a system may not result in a clear fusion of their
properties or their parameters but on different qualities that can be
better, worse or altogether different of what was there as the start-
ing point. Although molecular biology was born after the WWII
out of the interest of physicists for living objects, there was a sort of

T.J. McGenity et al. (eds.), Hydrocarbon and Lipid Microbiology Protocols, Springer Protocols Handbooks,
DOI 10.1007/8623_2015_185, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
Vı́ctor de Lorenzo

foundational choice for reductionist approaches that advocated the

focus on the details of specific biological constituents as a way to
understand the whole. Despite the spectacular development of
molecular biology for more than 30 years, the onset of techniques
for easy and cheap DNA sequencing and the generation of large
volumes of omics data on specific microorganisms have both
exposed the limitations of such reductionist strategies and opened
a possibility to study biological systems as a whole and not as a sum
of parts [2]. Ultimately, systemic approaches mean moving from a
focus on the separate components of a system towards the whole
of dynamic interactions between them. As Henrik Kacser, the
founder of metabolic control analysis, stated in a celebrated quote
“One thing is certain: if you want to understand the whole you
must study the whole” [3]. This criterium can be applied to nearly
every level of biological complexity but is particularly relevant to
examine environmental microorganisms [2]. In this context, there
is a need to incorporate conceptual methods imported from other
fields, in particular, the abstractions that are typical of physics and
mathematics and the modelling tools often taken from electric or
chemical engineering, as well as some principles of complexity
theory for tackling the behaviour of, e.g. non-linear systems [4].
Yet, there are some features of biological entities, specifically
microorganisms, that have one remarkable property when placed in
a multi-scale multifaceted scenario, namely, that the functionalities
encoded in their DNA can quickly penetrate through all complexity
layers, from the genome to complete landscapes. One dramatic
example is the global spread of antibiotic resistance genes from
their environmental point of origin, often resulting from minor
mutations in metabolic genes towards virtually all hospitals of the
world [5]. The unstoppable flow of DNA through all physical and
geographical barriers places a considerable focus of contemporary
systemic environmental microbiology on the genomes of the bac-
teria at stake (whether culturable or not) and on attempts to extract
from them as much information as possible [2]. This makes a
combination of wet data, collecting methods with bioinformatic
analysis and modelling necessary, as addressed separately in the
chapters below.
The diversity of assets available for systemic and synthetic
approaches to environmental microorganisms and their interface
with hydrocarbons has distinct but still intertwined aspects. On the
one hand, we have the deconstruction-reconstruction-redesign
agenda (the last with different qualities of the original system).
On the other hand, there are the wet vs the in silico strategies.
The papers contained in this volume provide a good panel of
current protocols that allow addressing both old and new questions
under systemic and synthetic perspectives. Note, however, that the
methods included in this collection focus exclusively in the aspects
that have to do with fundamental understanding of the system at
stake, not with practical bioengineering. The group of articles
 Systems and Synthetic Biology in Hydrocarbon Microbiology: Tools

under the umbrella of synthetic biology therefore deals with using

synthesis and directed design as the counterpart of analysis, the two
being the pillars of any research endeavour. Although some of these
concepts and methods described here are equally usable for explicit
bioengineering, e.g. for biotechnological purposes, the protocols
dealing with applied projections of synthetic biology have been
compiled in a separate Volume of this Protocol series (Hydrocarbon
and Lipid Microbiology Protocols: Synthetic and Systems Biology
Applications).

2 Systemic Approaches to Environmentally Relevant Bacteria

It is generally accepted that the key appeal of systems biology relies

on its power to translate loads of data into workable models that
help in understanding otherwise complex and undecipherable
biological entities. And, as a consequence, they guide experiments
for validation and further model refinement. In this respect, sys-
tems biology borrows from engineering the typical modelling/
testing/improvement cycle that is so typical of industrial design
[4]. The part of the cycle that has to do with massive data collection
(whether transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, etc.) has
been tackled in a different Volume (Hydrocarbon and Lipid Micro-
biology Protocols: Genetic, Genomic and Systems Analyses of Pure
Cultures) and will not be revisited here. The starting point of the
chapters below is instead the availability of enough data on the
microbial system under scrutiny that allows us to abstract the
components and apply models for their comprehension. And as
mentioned above, the methodologies discussed range from purely
wet to purely computational. One exemplary case is the set-up of
metabolic models out of genomic information, as discussed by
Nogales [6]. One reliable test of robustness of such in silico models
(as well as an awesome source of extra information) is the passing of
the strain under study through a large panel of growth conditions
(the so-called phenomic testing [7]). The effect of given perturba-
tions (e.g. mutations) on the resulting biochemical network can
thereby be checked by observing growth or lack of it on specific
carbon sources or stress settings. And once one has a good model in
hand, there is a large number of operations that one can perform
in vivo to understand specific steps of the metabolic traffic and,
wherever desired, modify the metabolism at user’s will. Along this
line, article [8] showcases one example in which systemic under-
standing of NAD(P)/NAD(P)H balance in environmental bacteria
results in strategies to make it a better host for knocked-in redox
reactions. In a further turn of the screw, one can also benefit from
modelling and computer-assisted genetic design for engineering
new biochemical and catalytic capabilities in pre-existing metabolic
networks, in fact one of the most spectacular products of contem-
porary systems biology [9, 10]. But one important detail is often
 Vı́ctor de Lorenzo

overlooked in systems-guided metabolic engineering: reactions do

not occur in dimensionless space but in a reactor (the cell) that has a
distinct 3D distribution of its material constituents. Biotransforma-
tions carried out by whole-cell catalysts must occur in time and
space as if in a chemical factory. How are microorganisms inside
organized thereof? To answer this question, one thinks immedi-
ately in looking at cells directly with a microscope: in fact, super-
resolution microscopy is a growingly feasible approach [11, 12].
But one can also generate a considerable amount of information on
the same matter through genetic and computational probing of co-
occurrent genomic spots, e.g. those that share the same transcrip-
tional factors. As presented in [13], such analyses allow dissection
of higher-level genomic architecture and perhaps identification of
optimal sites for knocking in new activities. The techniques just
mentioned can then be applied in various ways to decipher details of
the interplay between specific microorganisms and hydrocarbons as
well as gaining insight on the general properties of given bacterial
groups specialized in key environmental activities (e.g. methylo-
trophs [14]).

3 The Tools of Synthetic Biology

In its most widespread connotation, synthetic biology is associated

to the deep genetic design of biological systems for given biotech-
nological purposes (e.g. a sort of extreme genetic engineering
[15]). In reality, there is much more than that: synthetic biology
adopts engineering not as an analogy or a metaphor but as a
veritable interpretative frame [16, 17]. This choice becomes instru-
mental both for making sense of the relational logic of extant
biological objects and for (genetically) changing that logic in
order to create new-to-nature activities. Such an agenda (for the
sake of both understanding and doing) involves standardization,
metrology, definition of system’s boundaries, scalability, etc.; all of
them are engineering matters that have been traditionally put aside
in biological research. But the benefits of such a take (that involves
a new jargon for describing biological properties and transactions as
well [16, 17]) start just to be appreciated and expanding at the time
of writing this article. For now, synthetic biology approaches have
been mostly applied to E. coli, mycoplasma and yeast and to a much
lesser extent to other microorganisms. But the range of environ-
mental bacteria that can be the subject of these approaches is
growing. Some of the articles found in this volume map precisely
in this ongoing momentum.
Despite the ease and lowering of the price of chemically synthe-
sized DNA, the synthetic biology practitioner still faces the
problem of combining many variants of the same biological parts
for optimizing a given pathway or construct. It cannot come as a
surprise that techniques for the assembly of multiple DNA
 Systems and Synthetic Biology in Hydrocarbon Microbiology: Tools

segments are still quite a challenge and the subject of considerable

efforts. A number of strategies have been proposed to this end, and
the article Nørholm [18] describes in detail one that looks specially
promising for complex combinations or DNA fragments. A sepa-
rate matter is that of measuring the activity of the resulting con-
structs. As mentioned above, metrology is at the core of any serious
effort of engineering biological systems but still a phenomenal
challenge. Given the context dependency of the parameters asso-
ciated to virtually all biological functions [19], even the very simple
measurement of promoter activity is the subject of controversies
[20]. To alleviate this problem, [21] proposes a virtually automated
high-throughput method of prototyping promoter activity that can
be interfaced with computational analyses in order to unveil the
general rules that determine transcriptional activity. This is an
important step towards standardization of promoter strength and
the description of its potency in polymerase per second (PoPs)
units, a biological counterpart of electric current [22].
In addition to DNA assembly and standardization/metrology
of the gene expression flow, a third recurrent theme in synthetic
biology is orthogonality, e.g. the pursuit of a minimal dependence
of the engineered modules or devices on the host and vice versa
[23]. Although nature has already produced a large number of parts
and devices that work in a fashion somewhat autonomous of the
carrier (e.g. activities found in bacteriophages and mobile genetic
systems [24]), synthetic biology pushes these natural limits in new
directions. As shown in [25], one can reassign the meaning of given
triplets of the genetic code to be read by equally modified ribo-
somal constituents in order to generate orthogonal gene expression
devices. These amplify extant biological diversity as they allow
incorporation of non-natural or unusual amino acids into the struc-
ture of otherwise natural proteins.

4 Outlook

The wealth of conceptual and material tools delivered by contem-

porary systems and synthetic biology (of which the protocols of this
volume are just a sample) is bound to change the way we under-
stand and reshape biological entities as engineer-able objects. At the
same time, the creation in the laboratory of new biological activities
and the chances of their accidental scape or deliberate release into
the environment are not devoid of controversies that echo former
debates on the safety of genetically engineered microorganisms
[26]. In this context, article [27] reviews updated views on this
matter as well as fresh propositions to limit the spread of deeply
engineered (or even altogether synthetic) bacteria in a time in which
the hype and the promise of synthetic biology are also accompanied
by public fears on its possible damage if released out of control.
 Vı́ctor de Lorenzo

In sum, incomplete as it is because of the very fast develop-

ments in the field, this volume displays a representative palette of
quantitative strategies offered by systems and synthetic biology to
examine complex (micro)biological scenarios.

Acknowledgements

The work in Author’s Laboratory is supported by the CAMBIOS

Project of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness,
the ARISYS, EVOPROG and EMPOWERPUTIDA Contracts of
the EU, the ERANET-IB and the PROMT Project of the CAM.

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