Descripción del proyecto
Crear microbiomas complejos aprendiendo de la naturaleza
El equipo del proyecto PROMICON, financiado con fondos europeos, utiliza aplicaciones experimentales de fisiología cuantitativa, imagenología y clasificación celular junto con métodos de aprendizaje automático y biología de sistemas para estudiar el funcionamiento de microbiomas complejos. Estos conocimientos se aplicarán a los microbiomas existentes para ajustarlos a la producción y también se utilizarán en la creación de nuevos microbiomas sintéticos que tomen referencias de la naturaleza. El consorcio desarrollará cepas para crear un microbioma saludable y las utilizará para reducir la complejidad de los microbiomas naturales, mejorando así la producción de pigmentos basados en ficobilinas, de exopolisacáridos y polihidroxialcanoatos. De forma simultánea, se desarrollarán microbiomas sintéticos para la producción de butanol, dihidrógeno y PHACOS, un poliéster antimicrobiano funcionalizado. El objetivo final es introducir nuevos conceptos de reactores para microbiomas y realizar evaluaciones de producción para su futura explotación.
Objetivo
The deliberate control of complex microbiomes is notoriously difficult and current approaches are often guided by simple trial-and-error. Advances in quantitative analysis modelling and design of these systems are urgently needed to improve the predictability and enable exploitation of the amazing synthesis capacities of microbiomes. The PROMICON project will learn from nature how microbiomes function through development and application of quantitative physiology, imaging, cell sorting machine learning and systems biology. This will be used to steer existing microbiomes towards production and to generate new synthetic microbiomes inspired by nature through an iterative design-build-test-learn cycle. The new consortia will also contain strains developed through systems metabolic engineering and will be used for the production of energy carriers, drop-in chemical feedstocks and advanced biomaterials.
PROMICON will advance characterization tools to understand which strains (modules) are needed for a successful microbiome. It will identify the primary producers (farmers), secondary converters (labourers) and essential strains for microbiome stability (balancers). This knowledge will be used to reduce complexity of natural microbiomes for optimized production of phycobilli protein based pigments, exo-polysaccharides (EPS) and poly-hydroxyalkanoates (PHA) in a top-down approach. Secondly, synthetic microbiomes with increasing complexity (bottom-up) will be assembled for the production of butanol, H2 and PHACOS, a functionalized antimicrobial polyester. PROMICON will develop new reactor concepts and downstream processing for microbiomes and conduct early-stage life cycle assessment (LCA) to prepare exploitation.
This ground-breaking project will not only inspire completely new production pathways and a paradigm shift from monocultures to mixed cultures in biotechnology, but also has the potential beyond biotechnology to inspire novel treatment options in biomedicine.
Ámbito científico
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologymetabolic engineering
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterials
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiology
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Convocatoria de propuestas
Consulte otros proyectos de esta convocatoriaConvocatoria de subcontratación
H2020-FNR-2020-2
Régimen de financiación
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinador
04318 Leipzig
Alemania