Team:British Columbia/Project/Consortia
Consortia
Abstract
Key Achievements
Introduction
Microorganisms live in complex microbial communities in the wild, in which individual species with specialized phenotypes interact and cooperate with each other to perform complex metabolic functions. Following nature's examples, there is an increasing trend in using microbial communities for biotechnological application due to their robustness and the ability to perform complex metabolic tasks through the division of labor. Construction of synthetic microbial communities allows to compartmentalize and optimize metabolic functions in different hosts. The goal of our project is to design a stable, robust microbial community for the production of valuable compounds from lignocellulosic biomass. The metabolic processes are split between biomass-degrading bacteria and the production bacteria, which transforms the degradation products into valuable products. For the first part, we engineered Caulobacter displaying functional biomass-transforming enzymes that act on cellulose. For the second part, we engineered E.coli producing β-carotene as a proof of concept. Now we need to confirm that these two bacteria can be co-cultured together to generate a stable consortia for consolidated bioprocessing.
Check out other parts of our project below!
