Synthetic Microbial Consortia

Distributing metabolic functions.

Working Group: Biomining and Cyano

Fosmid library pools are used as an experimental, systems-level model for recovering enzymatic networks that enable distributed metabolism and cooperativity between fosmid clones, with current focus on networks underlying lignin transformation. Lignin transformation is hypothesized to be a multi-locus phenotype distributed across community members, requiring pathway components spanning initial depolymerization through biofunneling of lignin oligomers and monomers. Pooled fosmid libraries therefore represent a promising strategy for reconstructing lignin transformation phenotypes from environments where such activities are prevalent, functioning as synthetic microbial communities programmed into a uniform genetic background and shaped through selection to solve specific metabolic problems in an unsupervised manner. These pooling strategies aim to recover synergistic interactions between environmental genes enabling combinatorial lignin transformation across multi-step processes, building on demonstrated feasibility in a previous study of lignin transformation from coal bed fosmid clones (PMID: 24982175).