Barcoded microbial system for high-resolution object provenance
Jason Qian, Zhixiang Lu, Christopher P. Mancuso, Han‐Ying Jhuang, Rocío del Carmen Barajas‐Ornelas, Sarah A. Boswell, Fernando H. Ramírez‐Guadiana, Victoria Jones, Akhila Sonti, Kole Sedlack, Lior Artzi, Giyoung Jung, Mohammad Arammash, Mary E. Pettit, Michael Melfi, Lorena Lyon, Siân V. Owen, Michael Baym, Ahmad S. Khalil, Pamela A. Silver, David Z. Rudner, Michael Springer
Abstract
Determining where an object has been is a fundamental challenge for human health, commerce, and food safety. Location-specific microbes in principle offer a cheap and sensitive way to determine object provenance. We created a synthetic, scalable microbial spore system that identifies object provenance in under 1 hour at meter-scale resolution and near single-spore sensitivity and can be safely introduced into and recovered from the environment. This system solves the key challenges in object provenance: persistence in the environment, scalability, rapid and facile decoding, and biocontainment. Our system is compatible with SHERLOCK, a Cas13a RNA-guided nucleic acid detection assay, facilitating its implementation in a wide range of applications.