Building Synthetic Microbial Communities for Biology, Mitigating Climate Change, Sustainability and Biotechnology | 22 607

Opportunity Information: Apply for 22 607

The National Science Foundation (NSF) grant opportunity "Building Synthetic Microbial Communities for Biology, Mitigating Climate Change, Sustainability and Biotechnology" (Funding Opportunity Number 22-607; CFDA 47.074) supports research that intentionally designs, assembles, and studies engineered or synthetic microbial communities. The core idea behind the program is that microbes, when organized into communities, can perform complex functions that single organisms often cannot, and advances in molecular biology, synthetic biology, and bioengineering now make it possible to create communities with novel memberships, genetic features, and measurable traits. NSF is looking for projects that use these synthetic communities both as a tool for discovery in basic science and as a platform for practical solutions in environmental and industrial settings.

Proposals must clearly align with at least one of three program themes. The first theme focuses on discovering the underlying mechanisms, "rules," or principles that govern how synthetic microbial communities form, persist, function, and change over time, including community maintenance, stability, resilience, and evolution. This theme is aimed at building a more predictive science of community behavior, such as identifying how interactions like cooperation, competition, cross-feeding, signaling, spatial structure, and environmental constraints shape community outcomes. The second theme emphasizes using synthetic microbial communities as experimental systems to answer fundamental questions across biology, including molecular biology, cellular and organismal biology, ecology, and evolution. Here, synthetic communities are treated as controllable testbeds where variables can be tuned to probe causality, rather than relying only on complex natural communities where many factors are confounded. The third theme supports building synthetic communities for biotechnology, bioeconomy, and environmental engineering applications, with examples including production of new biorenewable chemicals, degradation of hard-to-break-down pollutants (including "forever chemicals"), enabling circular bioeconomy approaches, supporting sustainable agriculture, and mitigating climate change impacts. For this third theme, NSF places particular emphasis on genuinely novel community capabilities and on explaining the mechanisms that produce those capabilities, not just demonstrating incremental performance improvements.

Across all themes, competitiveness is tied to NSF's two primary review criteria: intellectual merit and broader impacts. The solicitation makes it clear that the highest priority goes to proposals that are strong on both, and that projects viewed as incremental or showing weaknesses in either category are unlikely to be competitive. On the broader impacts side, NSF highlights that the strongest proposals often include concrete assessment plans that explain how broader impacts activities will be evaluated, not just described. Because meaningful broader impacts work requires time, planning, and resources, proposers are encouraged to budget appropriately for these activities rather than treating them as add-ons.

NSF also signals that synthetic microbial community research must grapple directly with responsible innovation concerns. Proposals are expected to include careful consideration of the social and ethical dimensions of the work, along with biosafety and biosecurity issues, including risks of misuse and risks of unintended consequences to natural biological systems. Investigators have flexibility to address these topics either within the intellectual merit (for example, as part of the research design and risk analysis) or within broader impacts (for example, through stakeholder engagement, governance approaches, education, or policy-relevant outputs), but the expectation is that these considerations are thoughtful and integrated rather than superficial.

Finally, the solicitation places strong emphasis on reproducibility, noting that biological systems can be highly context-dependent and variable, which makes rigorous, defensible research practices especially important in this area. Applicants are expected to follow or advance best practices in sample collection and preparation, experimental design, data analysis, model development, and validation of computational or mathematical methods. The goal is to produce results that can be trusted, compared across studies, reused by other researchers, and scaled into larger bodies of knowledge, which is particularly critical for synthetic communities where small differences in conditions can lead to large differences in community behavior.

Administratively, the opportunity is an NSF discretionary grant program open to unrestricted applicants (meaning any entity type may apply, subject to any eligibility clarifications in the full solicitation). The opportunity was created June 24, 2022, with an original closing date of October 3, 2022, and NSF anticipated making around 12 awards. The award ceiling is listed as 0, which typically indicates that the specific maximum award amount is not set in the summary and applicants should consult the full program solicitation and NSF guidance for budget expectations and constraints.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Building Synthetic Microbial Communities for Biology, Mitigating Climate Change, Sustainability and Biotechnology" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.074.
• This funding opportunity was created on Jun 24, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Oct 03, 2022. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 12 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

Apply for 22 607

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