Figure 10.

The benefits of engineering environmental microbes. (A) Biosensors made using model organisms (purple) can present poor fitness under environmental conditions compared with native organisms (yellow). Advances in synthetic biology make possible the programming of native organisms (red) to overcome this limitation. (B) Environmental microbes can be programmed to directly report their behaviors like contributions to the nitrogen cycle. (C) Alternatively, incognito biosensors can be created that spy on a community without interfering with the process of interest.