I was immediately intrigued by the set-up of the experimental system (I am not familiar with microbial synthetic biology, and this is the first paper I have read in the area). The paper establishes the utility of the system and maps out the operating space of the parameters (e.g. levels of antibiotics); however, this could have been accomplished with fewer figures. Also, the paper does not flesh out the details of the system from a control/engineering point of view. Learning how to control such systems, or studying how the system is perturbed by the addition of a third bacterium, would provide the most utility in real-world applications.
In conclusion, the paper presents a potentially useful model system, though the data presented in the figures and the style of figure presentation are not particularly insightful.
