Microbial consortium—a group of different microbes that act together as a community—are ubiquitous in nature and support a wide variety of industrial processes, including wastewater treatment and environmental remediation. Synthetic microbial consortia can carry out complex tasks that individual organisms cannot and are more tolerant to environmental fluctuations. But building such synthetic consortia has proven time-consuming and difficult to sustain on an industrial scale.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s synthetic consortium platform rapidly creates an engineered microbial consortium that is self-sustaining. These consortia include a cyanobacterium—a type of autotroph—that obtains energy from sunlight through photosynthesis and uses the energy to produce sugars from carbon dioxide. In turn, the autotrophs supply many heterotrophs—organisms that consume carbon produced by other organisms—with the carbon and oxygen they need to harvest energy and produce biomass. The process is scalable and self-contained, so it is environmentally safe to use. The platform can be used to construct synthetic gene circuits, study cellular metabolism (for example, during cancer trials), and reprogram cellular behavior (for example, during disease treatment). It can also be used to make other microbial communities more productive, for example to generate more biomass for bioenergy applications, or more resilient, so they recover quickly from environmental shocks.

The platform includes a driver module that provides a source of carbon and oxygen to the consortium, a process module that carries out the function of the consortium, and a control module that senses the integrity and output of the consortium. It is designed to act as a standalone unit capable of operating safely within unpredictable and dynamic natural environments. Synthetic regulatory circuitry programs functional outputs and interactions between modules. Kits provide growth media and a culture vessel.

Applicability

Specific applications of the synthetic microbial consortia platform include the following:

• Cleaning up toxic waste
• Stabilizing metal and radionuclide contaminants in situ
• Biodegrading organic contaminants
• Developing renewable energy sources
• Improving conversion efficiency of plant biomass to energy
• Stabilizing carbon in the geosphere
• Providing methanogenesis and methane oxidation
• Detecting biological agents.