Synthetic biology for terraformation lessons from Mars, earth, and the microbiome

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.N.C.-P., B.V., R.S., and V.L. have been funded by PR01018-EC-H2020-FET-Open MADONNA project. Moreover, N.C.-P., B.V. and R.S. were partialy funded by European Research Council Advanced Grant (SYNCOM), and the Botin Foundation (Banco Santander through its Santander Universities Global Division). R.S. also counted with the support of the FIS2015-67616-P grant, the Santa Fe Institute, and the support of Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya. J.S. has been funded by a “Ramón y Cajal” contract RYC-2017-22243, and by the MINECO grant MTM2015-71509-C2-1-R and the Spain’s “Agencia Estatal de Investigación” grant RTI2018-098322-B-I00, as well as by the CERCA Programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya. F.T.M acknowledges the support by the European Research Council (ERC Grant Agreements 242658 [BIOCOM] and 647038 [BIODESERT], and also acknowledges support from Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEGENT/2018/041). M.D.B. acknowledges support from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions of the Horizon 2020 Framework Program H2020-MSCA-IF-2016 under REA grant agreement 702057 and acknowledges support from a Juan de la Cierva Formación grant from Spanish Ministry of Science (FJCI-2018-036520-I)