Engineering Microbial Consortia for Industry

Microbial communities inhabit our entire planet and play a vital role in biogeochemical processes through to human health. Although we have exploited these consortia for a variety of biotechnology processes, rapid technological advances have led to the emerging field of 'microbiome engineering', ripe for exploitation across a plethora of industries, and play a major role in facing grand challenges in health, food, energy and environment. This travel grant is focussed on translating knowledge of natural microbial diversity data, and combining this with expertise in microfluidic screening platforms, quantitative omics technologies and mathematical models to describe mixed-culture interactions for generating synthetic microbial consortia for industry.

Our previous work has revealed fundamental mechanisms by which microbes work together and we have translated this for industry at pilot scale. However, we have also encountered many unknowns to advance the field into more complex systems, particularly where we can recover multiple resources from waste, rather than just detoxify it.

To enable us to move into more design led approaches for constructing microbial communities, I have identified global leaders in their field, and the goal is to exchange knowledge and data and generate new exciting and ambitious grant proposals in engineering microbial consortia for industry.

The UK currently has limited research groups looking to engineer microbial communities. Contrarily, the USA is putting more resources and emphasis on developing the area, largely for healthcare and agriculture. This overseas travel grant will enable Dr. Pandhal to better understand the emerging techniques and approaches being employed, impacting on UK competitiveness in this engineering field.

The impact of this research is wide as any industry currently utilising microbial communities will have a tool box to engineer them for high performance or stronger resilience. For example- industrial biotechnology, food/beverage, bioremediation, waste management, resource recovery etc. The specific focus of our previous research and therefore more immediate for this proposal is waste treatment and resource recovery, which represents an exemplar application for knowledge and data exchange. From a technology perspective, the synthetic ecology/biology community will benefit from a methodology to create synthetic consortia, as well as analytical processing to screen co-cultures with associated omics analyses.

Impact will be seen across existing industries who have increasingly stringent regulations to meet in terms of waste treatment (e.g. EU Urban Waste Water Directive 91/271/EEC), industries with a desire to be more sustainable and use biological methods over chemical/physical approaches, and recover resources (circular economy). Engineering microbial communities has significant potential in more recently emerging industries too, including human health (gut microbiome) and agriculture (soil microbiome).

Due to the sustainability aspect of exploiting microbial communities, the more long term impacts on reducing resource use and waste production, as part of a circular economy, would have profound impact on ecosystem health, improving human-associated uses such as recreational water use (e.g. fishing, water sports, swimming, boat clubs etc.) and industry (fisheries etc.), as well as benefit to the natural environment (e.g. wildlife), and increase the opportunity to achieve "good ecological status" (National UK Ecosystem Assessment by Defra).

The interaction with World leading groups would be invaluable for Dr. Pandhals career progression. As well as generating new ideas and sharing knowledge, he is expected to generate further grant proposals to help understand rules governing the presence of specific microbes and the interactions between them. e.g. UKRI, Industry Challenge Strategy Fund.