Advances in Mixed Culture/Microbial Consortium for Metabolic Engineering

Cooperation and labor division are very common in nature, where organisms establish many different kinds of mutual relationships. The second wave of metabolic engineering has advanced the development of intelligent synthetic ecosystems, which can carry out complicated tasks that are more difficult or even impossible for individual populations to perform. Interesting exemplary consortia have been developed for mixed sugar consumption, mixed enzyme production, and transferring key metabolites from one partner to the other to enhance the overall productivity. This session will focus on metabolic engineering efforts in designing, optimizing, and modeling microbial consortia to realize complex and sophisticated cellular functions and provide extra gains in design efficiency and execution of bioengineering solutions.