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Background Genomics-driven discoveries of microbial species have provided extraordinary insights into the biodiversity of human microbiota. In addition, a significant portion of genetic variation between microbiota exists at the subspecies, or strain, level. High-resolution genomics to investigate species- and strain-level diversity and mechanistic studies, however, rely on the availability of individual microbes from a complex microbial consortia. High-throughput approaches are needed to acquire and identify the significant species- and strain-level diversity present in the oral, skin, and gut microbiome. Here, we describe and validate a streamlined workflow for cultivating dominant bacterial species and strains from the skin, oral, and gut microbiota, informed by metagenomic sequencing, mass spectrometry, and strain profiling. Results Of total genera discovered by either metagenomic sequencing or culturomics, our cultivation pipeline recovered between 18.1–44.4% of total genera identified. These represented a high proportion of the community composition reconstructed with metagenomic sequencing, ranging from 66.2–95.8% of the relative abundance of the overall community. Fourier-Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) was effective in differentiating genetically distinct strains compared with whole-genome sequencing, but was less effective as a proxy for genetic distance. Conclusions Use of a streamlined set of conditions selected for cultivation of skin, oral, and gut microbiota facilitates recovery of dominant microbes and their strain variants from a relatively large sample set. FT-IR spectroscopy allows rapid differentiation of strain variants, but these differences are limited in recapitulating genetic distance. Our data highlights the strength of our cultivation and characterization pipeline, which is in throughput, comparisons with high-resolution genomic data, and rapid identification of strain variation.

AbstractBiochemical processes often require spatial regulation and specific microenvironments. The general lack of organelles in bacteria limits the potential of bioengineering complex intracellular reactions. Here we demonstrate Transcriptionally Engineered Addressable RNA Solvent droplets (TEARS) as synthetic microdomains within the Escherichia coli. TEARS are assembled from RNA-binding protein recruitment domains fused to poly-CAG repeats that spontaneously drive liquid-liquid phase separation from the bulk cytoplasm. Targeting TEARS with fluorescent proteins revealed multilayered structures and a non-equilibrium mechanism controlling their composition and reaction robustness. We show that TEARS provide organelle-like bioprocess isolation for sequestering biochemical pathways, controlling metabolic branch points, buffering mRNA translation rates and scaffolding protein-protein interactions. TEARS are a simple and versatile tool for spatially controlling E. coli biochemistry.