PNNL researchers determine how microbial consortia might transcend the limitations of single organisms

In Washington state, an internationally recognized group of scientists, organized by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory microbiologists Dr. Stephen Lindemann and Dr. Alexander Beliaev, has reviewed the state of the science to determine how biotechnological use of communities of multiple microbes, or microbial consortia, might transcend the limitations of single organisms.

They posit that the time is ripe for design and control of microbial communities, and that achieving the ability to engineer microbial ecosystems will require a level of understanding of the mechanisms driving microbial community function only possible from combining recent advances in systems biology, computational modeling, and synthetic biology.

These new perspectives stemmed from a panel at the 15th International Symposium on Microbial Ecology in Seoul and appear in the International Society for Microbial Ecology’s (ISME) official publication, the ISME Journal.