ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2024
A synthetic microbial Daisyworld: planetary regulation in the test tube.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- One Earth-One Health to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance Having a Dual Mutation Pattern, Based on the Robust Self-Regulation and Perpetual Reconstruction of Ecosystems.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- One Earth-One Health (OE-OH): Antibacterial Effects of Plant Flavonoids in Combination with Clinical Antibiotics with Various Mechanisms.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Synthetic Ecosystems: From the Test Tube to the Biosphere.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Review
- A synthetic microbial Daisyworld: planetary regulation in the test tube.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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 by the exploration of synthetic ecosystems using genetic engineering and recent cell factory designs, here we propose a possible implementation for a microbial Daisyworld. This includes: (i) an explicit proposal for an engineered design of a two-strain consortia, using pH as the external, abiotic control parameter and (ii) several theoretical and computational case studies including two, three and multiple species assemblies. The special alternative implementations and their implications in other synthetic biology scenarios, including ecosystem engineering, are outlined.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.