Microorganisms play key roles in numerous natural and human-engineered processes. They live in synergistic communities in almost all the systems they are involved, ranging from soil, water, to human bodies. To advance our understanding of the working principles of these microbial communities, my laboratory employ new systems biology approaches to elucidate their underlying microbe-microbe and microbe-environment interactions. In this talk, I will highlight two complementary projects in my lab within this broad aim. In one project, we established an automated bioinformatics pipeline for generating large-scale in silico metabolic networks using emerging metagenomic sequencing data, which has been applied to the investigation of an acid mine drainage microbial community. In the other project, we developed a simple microfluidic device for highly parallel co-cultivation of symbiotic microbial communities, which is capable of discovering microbial interactions effectively.

 

Inspired by the ubiquitous existence of synergistic microbial consortia in nature, we are also exploring a promising alternative direction for microbial engineering - design and construction of synthetic microbial consortia consisting of different specialists to accomplish a complicated task. Our current application focus is lignocellulosic biofuel production. Our designed consortium includes one cellulolytic member responsible for hydrolyzing hemicellulose and cellulose (main components of lignocellulosic biomass) into mono and oligosaccharides; one hexose fermenting member for converting glucose monomer and oligosaccharides into desired biofuels such as butanol; and one pentose fermenting member for converting pentose sugars to biofuels. Such a synthetic microbial consortium integrating saccharification and fermentation capabilities will enable one-step “consolidated” bioprocessing (CBP), a potential breakthrough technology that can lead to large-scale and cost-effective production of next-generation lignocellulosic biofuels.