###Understanding robustness of microbial communities for bio-industry
Project ID: 2228bd1089 (You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Manufacturing The Future
UCL Lead department: Division of Biosciences
Lead Supervisor: Alex Fedorec
Project Summary:
Over the last few decades, we have made astounding leaps in improving our ability to engineer a range of organisms to perform a variety of tasks – from production of fine chemicals to the detection of tumours - by focusing on a very small number of model organisms. However, the last 5 years has seen an increasing interest in understanding and manipulating communities of microbes because there are fundamental limits to what we can ask particular cells to do – whether that be due to metabolic burden, toxicity of by-products, or inaccessibility of substrates among other considerations. To date, only small ad hoc synthetic microbial communities have been demonstrated. For microbial communities to become a useful tool for bioindustry, we need to acquire a better understanding of their interactions, dynamics, and limitations.
The aim of this project is to understand the emergence, and limits, of robustness in microbial communities and to use this understanding to enable the better design of communities and environments for bio-industry. We will produce two model microbial communities that are representative of the types of communities that will be useful for future applications in bioindustry. These will be an entirely synthetic E. coli community with engineered interaction, and a commonly observed inter-kingdom yeast and lactic acid bacteria community. We will then, perturb these communities to probe their behaviour under various industrially relevant conditions and stresses. Dynamical systems and metabolic modelling will be used to understand how interactions and the environment shape communities, and optimal experimental design will be used to inform experiments in bioreactors of various scales.