Broad-spectrum in situ genetic reprogramming of native microbiomes

SPARTA enables one-step in situ delivery and integration of large synthetic DNA, reprogramming 59 native microbial species across 16 families in soil, freshwater, and mammalian fecal microbiomes.

• Why it matters: Editing specific taxa inside complex native communities is needed to study and augment microbiome functions without losing community context.
• What they did: The SPARTA approach uses a broad-spectrum synthetic phage particle to package, deliver, and integrate large synthetic DNA, with ScRibe-seq using 16S crRNA-guided inference to identify engineered taxa.
• The result: SPARTA-ScRibe-seq delivered and validated functional synthetic gene clusters in diverse native microbiomes while preserving the original community structure, and SPARTA components were tunable toward targeted population shifts.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.