Engineering Synthetic Microbial Communities for Biomethane Production

复杂的微生物群落是全球化学循环和高等动物消化等自然过程的基础，通常用于工业规模的合成，废物处理和发酵。我们对这些群落的结构、稳定性和功能的基本理解是有限的，导致它们的研究被宣布为微生物生态学、微生物学和合成生物学的下一个前沿。以生物甲烷生产微生物群落（BMC）为重点，我们将采取优化自然群落和设计合成群落的两级方法，重点是实现稳健、高产的生物甲烷生产。在这一生物技术框架内，我们的提案将解决几个关于微生物群落结构和功能之间联系的基本科学问题。 为了确保在这个具有挑战性的项目中取得成功，我们组建了最强大的跨学科研究团队，结合了微生物生态学和进化，系统建模，分子微生物学，生物工程，基因组学和合成生物学方面的重要实践和科学专业知识。我们相信，该团队将提供，该项目将在科学和工业领域产生重大影响。通过我们的工作，在下面详细描述，我们将;显着提高目前的理解的结构功能关系的微生物群落，提供科学界与复杂的微生物群落的系统，时间基因组学和转录组学数据集，开发新的计算工具，微生物群落（重新）设计，并通过实验建立合成BMC，将作为模型生态系统在不同的研究领域。反过来，这些科学发展将通过优化生物甲烷生产的社区，为英国经济开发更可持续的生物能源解决方案。这将有助于提高生物甲烷作为替代燃料来源的效率。

Complex microbial communities underlie natural processes such as global chemical cycles and digestion in higher animals, and are routinely exploited for industrial scale synthesis, waste treatment and fermentation. Our basic understanding of the structures, stabilities and functions of such communities is limited, leading to the declaration of their study as the next frontier in microbial ecology, microbiology, and synthetic biology. Focusing on biomethane producing microbial communities (BMCs), we will undertake a two-tiered approach of optimising natural communities and designing synthetic communities with a focus on achieving robust, high-yield biomethane production. Within this biotechnological framework, our proposal will address several fundamental scientific questions on the link between the structure and function of microbial communities. To ensure success in this challenging project, we assembled the strongest possible interdisciplinary research team that combines significant practical and scientific expertise in microbial ecology and evolution, systems modelling, molecular microbiology, bioengineering, genomics, and synthetic biology. We are confident that this team will deliver and that this project will result in significant impact in the scientific and industrial domains. Through our work, described in detail below, we will; significantly improve the current understanding of the structure-function relation in microbial communities, provide the scientific community with a systematic, temporal genomics and transcriptomics dataset on complex microbial communities, develop novel computational tools for microbial community (re)design, and experimentally build synthetic BMCs that will act as model ecosystems in different research fields. These scientific developments, in turn, will accumulate in the development of more sustainable bioenergy solutions for the UK economy by optimising the communities underlying biomethane production. This will help to drive the efficiency of biomethane as an alternative fuel source.