Engineered microbial consortia: strategies and applications

Abstract

Many applications of microbial synthetic biology, such as metabolic engineering and biocomputing, are increasing in design complexity. Implementing complex tasks in single populations can be a challenge because large genetic circuits can be burdensome and difficult to optimize. To overcome these limitations, microbial consortia can be engineered to distribute complex tasks among multiple populations. Recent studies have made substantial progress in programming microbial consortia for both basic understanding and potential applications. Microbial consortia have been designed through diverse strategies, including programming mutualistic interactions, using programmed population control to prevent overgrowth of individual populations, and spatial segregation to reduce competition. Here, we highlight the role of microbial consortia in the advances of metabolic engineering, biofilm production for engineered living materials, biocomputing, and biosensing. Additionally, we discuss the challenges for future research in microbial consortia.

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

“…Controlling spatial patterning allows for the compartmentalization of different functional genetic circuits, which is an effective means of reducing both the biochemical crosstalk and the complexity of synthetic genetic circuits within each microbe. A direct consequence of this study is the ability to develop more sophisticated gene circuits for distributed computing 32,33 . Additionally, our models can be built upon to study the behavior of natural microbial consortia.…”

Engineering consortia by polymeric microbial swarmbots

“…However, as a microbial community increases in the number of different populations, the community complexity increases due to the combinatorial increase in the number of pairwise interactions and the emergence of higher-order interactions 22 . The complexity of controlling these interactions makes constructing and predicting the dynamics of these networks difficult, even in small communities 3 , 23 . In nature, another commonly used strategy by microorganisms to achieve the balance of the community is to inhabit with a spatial organization.…”

Integrase-mediated differentiation circuits improve evolutionary stability of burdensome and toxic functions in E. coli

“…A homogenous population of cells all performing the same function is largely unique to the laboratory environment, and recent years have seen the merit of breaking with this paradigm by engineering consortia instead of individual strains. 15 With inspiration from microbial communities, there have been numerous successful implementations of metabolic division of labor for production of biomolecules of interest. [16][17][18] This strategy has numerous advantages, including reducing the number of genes and associated metabolic load in each specialized cell type, allowing independent optimization of separate pathways, and spatially separating potentially incompatible functions.…”