Engineered antimicrobial-derived peptides to manipulate mixed microbial systems.

Due to the complexity of microbial communities and coarseness of currently available manipulation techniques (e.g., transplantation and antibiotic treatment), it is often difficult to fully elucidate the interactions between members that define community structure and function from the top down. Thus, it is imperative to be able to observe and manipulate subpopulations within microbial communities to enable a fine-detail understanding of the full spectrum and mechanism of community functions. However, there is a technological gap that prevents targeted manipulation of subpopulations within intact microbial mixtures and communities. In this work, we develop molecular probes to manipulate specific subpopulations within multispecies microbial populations and validate these methods using model synthetic populations IMPORTANCE: We demonstrate a novel approach for top-down manipulation of microbial co-cultures by leveraging the narrow-spectrum activity of a class IIa bacteriocin (bacterial-derived antimicrobial peptide). We expect this approach to be applicable to other microbial communities/microbiota when expanded to other bacteriocins and may prove to be an invaluable tool in studying structure-function relationships in microbial communities and engineering them for a variety of applications.