• Start
• Team
  • Members
  • TU Braunschweig
  • Official Team Profile
  • Attributions
• Project
  • Project Outline
  • Results
  • Engineering Principles
  • Approach
  • Potential Impact
  • Parts submitted to the registry
  • Notebook
  • Protocols
  • Acknowledgements
• Human Practices
  • Overview
  • Activities
  • Guide Part 1 - Communication strategy
  • Guide Part 2 - Implementation
  • Guide Part 3- Media Coverage Report
  • Guide Part 4 - Social Media Analysis
• Cooperations
• Safety
• Judging
• 

Potential Impact

Because microbial consortia are able to perform more complex tasks than monocultures and are more robust to environmental changes [1] the impact of our project – the engineering of a stable synthetic microbial consortium – has to be considered strong for many fields in biotechnology. For instance, current literature discusses the impact of complex bacterial systems on overall production and composition of biofuels [2], which is a rapidly growing field of interest due to increasing consumption of limited terrestrial oil resources. Aside from biofuel production, microbial consortia are already used in wastewater treatment [1]. Eiteman et al. demonstrated that lignocellulosic biomass is more efficiently fermented in a consortium of two different E. coli strains than in monocultures [3]. However, no mechanism to efficiently control these complex systems has been established yet. We address this issue in our project.
With our system we contribute to the establishment of a universal and widely applicable system for bacterial co-cultivation in order to expand the potential of synthetic biology to more complex tasks.

Single steps of biotechological processes can be split between individual strains in microbial consortia. (modified from [1])

References:
[1] Brenner, K., L. You, and F.H. Arnold, Engineering microbial consortia: a new frontier in synthetic biology.Trends Biotechnol, 2008. 26(9): p. 483-9.
[2] Kerner, A., et al., A Programmable Escherichia coli Consortium via Tunable Symbiosis. PLoS ONE, 2012. 7(3): p. e34032.
[3] Eiteman, M., S. Lee, and E. Altman, A co-fermentation strategy to consume sugar mixtures effectively. Journal of Biological Engineering, 2008. 2(1): p. 3.

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