Engineering Microbial Consortia for Industry

微生物群落居住在我们的整个星球上，并在生物地球化学过程中发挥着至关重要的作用。虽然我们已经利用这些财团进行各种生物技术过程，但快速的技术进步已经导致了“微生物组工程”的新兴领域，成熟用于众多行业的开发，并在面临健康，食品，能源和环境的重大挑战中发挥重要作用。这项旅行资助的重点是翻译自然微生物多样性数据的知识，并将其与微流体筛选平台，定量组学技术和数学模型的专业知识相结合，以描述混合培养物的相互作用，为工业生产合成微生物财团。我们以前的工作揭示了微生物协同工作的基本机制，我们已经在中试规模上将其翻译为工业。然而，我们也遇到了许多未知因素，将该领域推进到更复杂的系统中，特别是我们可以从废物中回收多种资源，而不仅仅是解毒。为了使我们能够进入更多以设计为主导的方法来构建微生物群落，我已经确定了该领域的全球领导者，其目标是交换知识和数据，并在工业微生物工程联合体方面产生新的令人兴奋和雄心勃勃的资助提案。

Microbial communities inhabit our entire planet and play a vital role in biogeochemical processes through to human health. Although we have exploited these consortia for a variety of biotechnology processes, rapid technological advances have led to the emerging field of 'microbiome engineering', ripe for exploitation across a plethora of industries, and play a major role in facing grand challenges in health, food, energy and environment. This travel grant is focussed on translating knowledge of natural microbial diversity data, and combining this with expertise in microfluidic screening platforms, quantitative omics technologies and mathematical models to describe mixed-culture interactions for generating synthetic microbial consortia for industry.Our previous work has revealed fundamental mechanisms by which microbes work together and we have translated this for industry at pilot scale. However, we have also encountered many unknowns to advance the field into more complex systems, particularly where we can recover multiple resources from waste, rather than just detoxify it. To enable us to move into more design led approaches for constructing microbial communities, I have identified global leaders in their field, and the goal is to exchange knowledge and data and generate new exciting and ambitious grant proposals in engineering microbial consortia for industry.