Ravi U. Sheth

TL;DR: It is argued that 'in situ microbiome engineering' represents a new paradigm of community-scale genetic and microbial engineering that can directly add, remove, or modify specific sets of functions and alter community-level properties in terrestrial, aquatic, and host-associated microbial communities.

TL;DR: This work computationally identifies the first biological thiosulfate sensor and an improved tetrathionate sensor, both two‐component systems from marine Shewanella species, and validate them in laboratory Escherichia coli, and develops a method based upon oral gavage and flow cytometry of colon and fecal samples to demonstrate that colon inflammation activates the thios sulfurate sensor in mice harboring native gut microbiota.

TL;DR: This work systematically optimize the expression of each sensor histidine kinase and response regulator, and redesign both pathway output promoters, resulting in low leakiness and 72- and 117-fold dynamic range, respectively.

TL;DR: A “biological tape recorder” in which biological signals trigger intracellular DNA production that is then recorded by the CRISPR-Cas adaptation system and a multiplexing strategy to simultaneously record the temporal availability of three metabolites in the environment of a cell population over time is demonstrated.

TL;DR: This Review, Sheth and Wang describe emerging synthetic biology approaches for using DNA as a memory device for recording cellular events, including the various methodological steps from detecting diverse signals, converting them into DNA alterations and reading out and interpreting the recorded information.