Synthetic Biology Tools to Engineer Microbial Communities for Biotechnology

Abstract

Microbial consortia have been used in biotechnology processes, including fermentation, waste treatment, and agriculture, for millennia. Today, synthetic biologists are increasingly engineering microbial consortia for diverse applications, including the bioproduction of medicines, biofuels, and biomaterials from inexpensive carbon sources. An improved understanding of natural microbial ecosystems, and the development of new tools to construct synthetic consortia and program their behaviors, will vastly expand the functions that can be performed by communities of interacting microorganisms. Here, we review recent advancements in synthetic biology tools and approaches to engineer synthetic microbial consortia, discuss ongoing and emerging efforts to apply consortia for various biotechnological applications, and suggest future applications.

Highlights

Microbial consortia exhibit advantages over monocultures, including division of labor, spatial organization, and robustness to perturbations.

Synthetic biology tools are used to construct and control consortia by manipulating communication networks, regulating gene expression via exogenous inputs, and engineering syntrophic interactions.

Synthetic biology approaches to control the behaviors of individual species within a consortium include population control, distribution of tasks, and spatial organization.

Constructing microbial consortia is enhanced by computational models, which can predict preferred metabolic cross-feeding networks and infer population dynamics over time.

Microbial biotechnology benefits from consortia due to the unique catalytic activities of each member, their ability to use complex substrates, compartmentalization of pathways, and distribution of molecular burden.