The amalgamation of mineral and targeted bacterial preparations represents a new generation of agricultural technology. Inoculation with combined preparations of microorganisms is more effective than inoculation with a single microorganism in stimulating plant growth by providing a more balanced diet for various crops. In this work, the effect of inoculation of 20 consortium variants on the yield indicators of three crops (wheat, buckwheat, corn) and the soil microbiome in the open field was investigated. The soil microbiome was defined by 16S rRNA sequences through NGS. Species richness of the soil microbial community (alpha diversity) was similar for all studied samples. Beta-diversity analysis revealed that the microbial diversity of three soil samples (C.bw, F.bw and Soil.bw) differed significantly from all others. At the phylum level, the number of Acidobacteriota and Firmicutes in these samples was increased. For the combination “Consortium C (Rothia endophytic GMG9 and Azotobacter chroococcum GMG39) - buckwheat”, a systemic positive improvement in all growth and yield indicators was observed. The soil of the site where buckwheat grew, inoculated by Consortium C, contained significantly more available phosphorus than all other soil samples. Such results can be explained both by the direct action of a consortium of phosphate-immobilizing and nitrogen-fixing bacteria and to acidification of the medium due to an increase in phylum Acidobacteriota bacteria in the soil.

Microalgae are used in various biotechnological processes, such as biofuel production due to their high biomass yields, agriculture as biofertilizers, production of high-value-added products, de-contamination of wastewater, or as biological models for carbon sequestration. The number of these biotechnological applications is increasing, and as such, any advances that contribute to reducing costs and increasing economic profitability can have a significant impact. Nitrogen fixing organisms, often called diazotroph, also have great biotechnological potential, mainly in agri-culture as an alternative to chemical fertilizers. Microbial consortia typically perform more com-plex tasks than monocultures and can execute functions that are challenging or even impossible for individual strains or species. Interestingly, microalgae and diazotrophic organisms are capable to embrace different types of symbiotic associations. Certain corals and lichens exhibit this sym-biotic relationship in nature, which enhances their fitness. However, this relationship can also be artificially created in laboratory conditions with the objective of enhancing some of the biotech-nological processes that each organism carries out independently. As a result, the utilization of microalgae and diazotrophic organisms in consortia is garnering significant interest as a potential alternative for reducing production costs and increasing yields of microalgae biomass, as well as for producing derived products and serving biotechnological purposes. This review makes an effort to examine the associations of microalgae and diazotrophic organisms, with the aim of highlighting the potential of these associations in improving various biotechnological processes.

The stability and harmony of ecological niches rely on intricated interactions between their members. During evolution, organisms have developed the ability to thrive in different environments taking advantage of each other’s metabolic symphonies. Among them, microalgae are a highly diverse and widely distributed group of major primary producers whose interactions with other organisms play essential roles in their habitats. Understanding the basis of these interactions is crucial to control and exploit these communities for ecological and biotechnological applications. The green microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a well-established model, is emerging as a model organism for studying a wide variety of microbial interactions with ecological and economic significance. In this review, we bring together and discuss current knowledge that points to C. reinhardtii as a model organism for studying microbial interactions.

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.

Knowledge of the agricultural soil microbiota, of the microbial consortia that comprise it, and the promotion of agricultural practices that maintain and encourage them, is a promising way to improve soil quality for sustainable agriculture and to provide food security. Although numerous studies have demonstrated the positive effects of beneficial soil microorganisms on crop yields and quality, the use of microbial consortia in agriculture remains low. Microbial consortia have more properties than an individual microbial inoculum, due to the synergy of the microorganisms that make them up. This review describes the main characteristics, ecosystem functions, crop benefits and biotechnological applications of microbial consortia composed of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, plant growth promoting bacteria and actinobacteria, to promote the restoration of agricultural soils and, consequently, the quality and health of agricultural crops. The aim is to provide knowledge that will contribute to the development of sustainable and sufficiently productive agriculture, which will adapt in a good way to the pace of the growing human population and to climate change.

Many complex behaviours in biological systems emerge from large populations of interacting molecules or cells, generating functions that go beyond the capabilities of the individual parts. Such collective phenomena are of great interest to bioengineers due to their robustness and scalability. However, engineering emergent collective functions is difficult because they arise as a consequence of complex multi-level feedback, which often spans multiple length-scales. Here, we present a perspective on how some of these challenges could be overcome by using multi-agent modelling as a design framework within synthetic biology. Using case studies covering the construction of synthetic ecologies to biological computation and synthetic cellularity, we show how multi-agent modelling can capture the core features of complex multi-scale systems and provide novel insights into the underlying mechanisms which guide emergent functionalities across scales. The ability to unravel design rules underpinning these behaviours offers a means to take synthetic biology beyond single molecules or cells and towards the creation of systems with functions that can only emerge from collectives at multiple scales.