Construction of Environmental Synthetic Microbial Consortia: Based on Engineering and Ecological Principles

Abstract

In synthetic biology, engineering principles are applied to system design. The development of synthetic microbial consortia represents the intersection of synthetic biology and microbiology. Synthetic community systems are constructed by co-cultivating two or more microorganisms under certain environmental conditions, with broad applications in many fields including ecological restoration and ecological theory. Synthetic microbial consortia tend to have high biological processing efficiencies, because the division of labor reduces the metabolic burden of individual members. In this review, we focus on the environmental applications of synthetic microbial consortia. Although there are many strategies for the construction of synthetic microbial consortia, we mainly introduce the most widely used construction principles based on cross-feeding. Additionally, we propose methods for constructing synthetic microbial consortia based on traits and spatial structure from the perspective of ecology to provide a basis for future work.

Immobilized nanoscale zero-valent iron for synergistic enhanced removal of pentachlorobenzene with Pseudomonas sp. JS100

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Probing patterning in microbial consortia with a cellular automaton for spatial organisation

“…Our work can provide initial insights into the role played by the environment in spatiotemporal control by simulating conditions that vary the diffusion coefficients and degradation rates of AHL molecules. However, directly extrapolating these insights to natural complex microbiomes remains limited www.nature.com/scientificreports/ due to the inherent complexity of characterizing these contexts 34 . That is, we are constrained by the availability of quantitative measurements in studying natural microbial communities.…”

Environmental microbiome engineering for the mitigation of climate change

“…Microbial inocula are communities designed using one of a variety of strategies to be delivered into natural environments and confer changes to ecosystem function targets. Inoculum design proceeds through the bottom‐up assembly of small consortia or through the top‐down enrichment of whole communities and either can include elements of synthetic biology (Lawson et al, 2019; Liang et al, 2022) (Figure 3). Top‐down and bottom‐up strategies to inocula design offer trade‐offs in functional specificity, maintenance, and chance of establishment following inoculation (Table 2).…”

“…However, there is skepticism about the physiological role of keystone species and whether they alone are able to persist over longer, ecologically relevant timescales following inoculation (Albright et al, 2021) or whether the traits of keystone taxa are maintained in the context of a new community, such as when delivered as an inoculum. Recent opinions have advocated for assembling consortia more methodically, by characterizing species interactions through culturing assays and computational simulations in order to incorporate these community dynamics into consortium design (Lawson et al, 2019; Liang et al, 2022; Rodríguez Amor & Dal Bello, 2019).…”