Synthetic yeast communities for sustainable bioproduction by Rodrigo LEDESMA-AMARO

Abstract: Traditional bioprocesses are usually carried out by a single microbial species, converting a feedstock into a product of interest. Yields are often limited by incomplete feedstock utilisation, byproduct formation, metabolic burden and inefficiencies in metabolic pathways. However, in nature, ecosystems are colonised by multiple species that cooperate to maximise resource utilisation and performance. Therefore, in the last few years, there has been a high interest in exploring the creation of synthetic microbial communities that can improve bioproduction.
While research in engineering microbial communities is in its infancy, we have now developed tools that allow us to design communities with defined behaviours, such as the capacity to divide labour either in production or feedstock utilisation or to control population ratios to optimise metabolic fluxes across multiple cells.
In this presentation, I will present the latest advances from our group in developing tools to create microbial communities, showing how these tools can be used to build communities that outperform monocultures.
Examples include the development of a cross-feeding platform for improving cooperation [1], a toolbox for population control [2], the creation of communities specialised in using renewable feedstocks [3] or recycling fermentation byproducts [4], the formation of cross-species communities [5] and others [6]. These communities performed better than the monocultures in producing various products such as antioxidants, food ingredients, plastics precursors, chemicals, biofuels, etc. Future trends and challenges of the field will be discussed.
[1] Aulakh et al. Spontaneously established syntrophic yeast communities improve bioproduction. Nature Chemical Biology (2023)
[2] Peng et al. A molecular toolkit of cross-feeding strains for engineering synthetic yeast communities. Nature Microbiology (2024)
[3] Chen et al. Synthetic, marine, light-driven, autotroph-heterotroph co-culture system for sustainable ?-caryophyllene production. Bioresource Technology (2024)
[4] Rafieenia et al. Designing synthetic microbial communities with the capacity to upcycle fermentation byproducts to increase production yields. Trends in Biotechnology (2024)
[5] Park et al. Engineered cross-feeding creates inter- and intra-species synthetic yeast communities with enhanced bioproduction. Nature communications (2024)
 

Biography: Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro is a Professor at Imperial College London, where he leads a research group working on Engineering Biology and sustainability. He is the director of the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Proteins and the Microbial Food Hub. His research focuses on the use of microorganisms to convert renewable feedstocks into valuable products (such as food ingredients). He has published over 200 articles, most on topics related to microbial bioproduction (precision, biomass and traditional fermentation).
Rodrigo obtained his PhD at the University of Salamanca (Spain). Before joining Imperial, he carried out his postdoctoral research at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE, France). He has been a visiting researcher at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) and AIST (Japan).
 

Rodrigo LEDESMA-AMARO is Professor at Imperial College London, more details -> Rodrigo LEDESMA-AMARO