Engineering Synthetic Anaerobic Consortia Inspired by the Rumen for Biomass Breakdown and Conversion
EMSL Project ID
60280
Abstract
Lignocellulosic plant biomass is a widely-abundant renewable resource that can be harnessed for value-added production of fuels & chemicals. While microbes have been engineered to breakdown lignocellulose and turn released sugars into products, this remains an energy-intensive process that requires expensive pretreatment and separation steps. Furthermore, it is difficult to engineer all desirable traits for breakdown and conversion into one organism. This project will develop a new strategy that relies on microbial partnerships formed in the herbivore rumen to liberate sugars from crude plant biomass and convert that sugar to value-added chemicals. Microbial consortia consisting of fungi, bacteria, and archaea form tight associations in the herbivore rumen, which divide-and-conquer the difficult tasks of biomass breakdown. This project will leverage a “synthetic rumen” consortium composed of anaerobic fungi and chain-elongating bacteria to study which metabolites are shared and exchanged between microbes and identify strategies to bolster lignocellulose conversion to value-added products. Our approach will develop high-throughput systems and synthetic biology approaches to realize stable synthetic consortia that route lignocellulosic carbon into short and medium chain fatty acids (SCFAs/MCFAs) rather than methane. Key research objectives are to (1) design and predict anaerobic fungal and bacterial consortia that efficiently convert lignocellulosic biomass into medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs), (2) understand how fermentation parameters and microbe-microbe interactions regulate and drive microbiome metabolic fluxes, and (3) use genomic editing to alter the fermentation byproducts of anaerobic fungi and bolster MCFA titers and yields.
Project Details
Start Date
2022-02-23
End Date
N/A
Status
Active
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members