Title:
Design of Microbial Consortia for Industrial Biotechnology
Design of Microbial Consortia for Industrial Biotechnology
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Authors
Barton, Paul
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Abstract
Large-scale production using microorganisms has long been recognized as a
promising source for sustainable fuels and chemicals. However, monocultures
optimized for high metabolic production in a sterile laboratory environment
are often not economical at production scale due to high costs of capital and
substrates, lack of resilience and stability of the culture, etc. On the
other hand, most microorganisms in natural environments do not live in
isolation, but exist as part of complex, dynamically changing, microbial
consortia. These natural consortia exhibit high productivity combined with
high resilience to invasion and can process a wide range of readily available
substrates. Hence, synthesis of artificial biological process systems based
on microbial consortia seems a promising approach to low cost sustainable
production of fuels and chemicals.
Nevertheless, it remains a great challenge to realize such multispecies
cultures in industrial applications. Using algal production of fuels and
chemicals as an illustrative example, we outline a roadmap towards the
quantitative design and optimization of low cost resilient artificial
ecologies based on microbial consortia. To address this challenge,
multi-scale models are proposed, which integrate metabolic information
available from high-throughput experiments with the ecological scale of the
interactions between multiple species and the process scale of bioreactors.
These models are formulated as dynamic systems with optimization problems
embedded, and progress towards numerical tools for simulation, sensitivity
analysis and optimization will be reported. The long-term goal is a
quantitative approach that will enable chemical engineers to design
artificial ecologies for a desired purpose in much the same manner as a
traditional chemical process.
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Date Issued
2014-09-17
Extent
62:11 minutes
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Moving Image
Resource Subtype
Lecture