Background
There is no mono-culture in nature! And in industry, coculture of species/strains are widely used to either improve productivity or lower the cost. The manufacturing of Vitamin C in China, which has contributed to 60 percent of its world production, could serve as an excellent example to validate the significance of coculture in industry. Thus to understand the interactions between coexistent ecosystems will not only contribute to human’s perception of nature but also to human practices in engineering.

The attempts to uncover the mechanics and complex interrelations within natural microbial systems and quantitatively measurement of environmental factors on system behavior often failed because of the entangled intrinsic parameters and un-measurable population dynamics.

We designed and constructed an ecosystem constituted of two strains of E.coli, which could represent various biological relationships along with the fluctuation of antibiotics concentration as the environmental pressure and the inducing molecular such as IPTG and arabinose as the regulating factors.