Authors
Diego Ruiz-Sanchis, Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro
Published in
Current opinion in biotechnology. Volume 101. Pages 103556. Aug 02, 2026. Epub Aug 02, 2026.
Abstract
Microbial consortia offer significant advantages over monocultures in biotechnological applications, including access to a broader metabolic repertoire, functional redundancy and the capacity for division of labour. Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) has similarly proven to be a powerful tool in metabolic engineering, uncovering solutions inaccessible through rational design alone. Despite their individual potential, the intersection of ALE and synthetic microbial consortia in bioproduction contexts remains underexplored. This review examines recent advances at this intersection, with a focus on bottom-up synthetic consortia and co-cultures. Artificial selection operates at organismal and supra-organismal levels in microbial communities, and this not only shapes their productive output, but it may also compromise the evolvability of costly production functions. This effect can be limited by engineering ecological interactions that stabilise community composition. ALE and synthetic consortia mutually expand each other's applicability through a variety of implementation logics. However, current approaches predominantly rely on growth-based selection, and we argue that implementing inter-community artificial selection strategies holds considerable untapped potential.
PMID:
42543053
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 03 Aug 2026.
Read full publication at:
Please sign in
to see all details.
Advertisement
Stats
- Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
- Views 6
- Comments 0