BACTERIA-ON-A-CHIP: Microfluidic chemostats to decipher the responsiveness of bacterial communities

This project will pursue the next frontier in soil microbiome research by combining microfluidics, microscopy and sequencing to investigate microbial activation. Our objective is to engineer 'BACTERIA-ON-A-CHIP' microfluidic technologies to decipher the responsiveness of bacterial communities at single-cell level. We aim to develop microfluidic chemostats to understand spore activation, assess the responsiveness of complex bacterial communities, isolate and identify species that exhibit very high reactivity and develop closed-loop microfluidic platforms to steer gene expression or cell behaviour towards desired goals to aid the identification of new bioinoculants, optimise plant growth and improve sustainability in agriculture.