Microbial community engineering to reduce carbon and nitrogen footprints in biomanufacturing
EMSL Project ID
60661
Abstract
Conventional bioplatforms for production of renewable fuels and chemicals often represent monocultures of heterotrophic microorganisms (e.g. fungi) that require feeding with organic carbon (e.g. sugars) and nitrogen (e.g. ammonia). Demand for these carbon and nitrogen substrates defers decarbonization efforts and undermines economical sustainability of biomanufacturing. Alternatively, microorganisms thrive in nature as robust to perturbation multi-species communities capable for efficient sourcing of carbon and nitrogen from atmospheric CO2 and N2 through division of labor, cross-feeding and spatial organization. This project targets developing of model heterotroph-photoautotroph-diazotroph communities to serve as metabolically linked, flexible, genetically tractable and biomanufacturing-relevant model bioplatforms with reduced carbon and nitrogen footprints. In partnership with other teams we will apply multi-omics and chemical biology profiling in concert with computational modelling to discover the principles modulating the whole community phenome through interspecies interactions. By uncovering the universal principles governing these model microbial communities we will enable predictive phenomics and will be better equipped for rational engineering of industrial synthetic communities with reduced carbon and nitrogen footprints as well as for understanding population dynamics and metabolic cross-feeding networks in of more intricate natural multi-species systems dependent on fixation of CO2 and N2.
Project Details
Start Date
2023-01-17
End Date
2023-10-01
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigator(s)