Maull, V.; Pla Mauri, J.; Conde Pueyo, N.; Solé, R. A Synthetic Microbial Daisyworld: Planetary Regulation in the Test Tube. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 2024, 21, doi:10.1098/rsif.2023.0585.
Maull, V.; Pla Mauri, J.; Conde Pueyo, N.; Solé, R. A Synthetic Microbial Daisyworld: Planetary Regulation in the Test Tube. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 2024, 21, doi:10.1098/rsif.2023.0585.
Maull, V.; Pla Mauri, J.; Conde Pueyo, N.; Solé, R. A Synthetic Microbial Daisyworld: Planetary Regulation in the Test Tube. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 2024, 21, doi:10.1098/rsif.2023.0585.
Maull, V.; Pla Mauri, J.; Conde Pueyo, N.; Solé, R. A Synthetic Microbial Daisyworld: Planetary Regulation in the Test Tube. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 2024, 21, doi:10.1098/rsif.2023.0585.
Abstract
The idea that the Earth system self-regulates in a habitable state was proposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock, who conjectured that life plays a self-regulatory role on a planetary-level scale. A formal approach to such hypothesis was presented afterwards under a toy model known as the Daisyworld. The model showed how such life-geosphere homeostasis was an emergent property of the system, where two species with different properties adjusted their populations to the changing external environment. So far, this ideal world exists only as a mathematical or computational construct, but it would be desirable to have a real, biological implementation of Lovelock's picture beyond our one Biosphere. Inspired in the exploration of synthetic ecosystems using genetic engineering and recent cell factory designs, here we propose such a living, microbial Daisyworld. This is based on a synthetic microbial ecosystem using pH as the external, abiotic control parameter. Several case studies are considering, including two, three and multiple species assemblies. Despite that oscillatory dynamics and chaos emerge in the latter case, it is shown that global regulation is also achieved in most cases as species diversity increases. The alternative implementations and their implications of this model in other synthetic biology scenarios, including ecosystem engineering, are outlined.
Keywords
Daisyworld; homeostasis; Earth Systems Science; synthetic biology; terraformation
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
