Submitted:
22 September 2020
Posted:
23 September 2020
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Abstract
Microbes do not live in isolation but in microbial communities. The relevance of microbial communities is increasing due to the awareness about their biotechnological influences in a huge number of environmental, health and industrial processes. Hence, being able to control and engineer the output of both natural and synthetic communities would be of great interest. However, most of the available methods and biotechnological applications (both in vivo and in silico) have been developed in the context of isolated microbes. In vivo microbial consortia development, i.e. to reproduce the community life conditions in the wet-lab, is extremely difficult and expensive requiring of computational approaches to advance knowledge about microbial communities, mainly with descriptive modelling, and further with engineering modelling. In this review we provide a detailed compilation of available examples of engineered microbial communities as a launch pad for an exhaustive and historical revision of those computational methods devoted so far toward the better understanding, and rational engineering of natural and synthetic microbial communities.
Keywords:
genome-scale metabolic model
; microbial community
; optimization
; design
; engineering
; computational methods
; synthetic microbial consortia
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
