Descrizione del progetto
Creare microbiomi complessi imparando dalla natura
Il progetto PROMICON, finanziato dall’UE, utilizza applicazioni sperimentali di fisiologia quantitativa, imaging e ordinamento delle cellule in combinazione con approcci di apprendimento automatico e biologia dei sistemi per studiare il funzionamento di microbiomi complessi. Questa conoscenza sarà applicata ai microbiomi esistenti per adattarli alla produzione e sarà anche usata per la creazione di nuovi microbiomi sintetici prendendo spunto dalla natura. Il consorzio svilupperà ceppi per creare un microbioma di successo e li userà per ridurre la complessità dei microbiomi naturali, migliorando la produzione di pigmenti a base di ficobilina, esopolisaccaridi e poliidrossialcanoati. Contemporaneamente, saranno sviluppati microbiomi sintetici per la produzione di butanolo, diidrogeno e PHACOS, un poliestere antimicrobico funzionalizzato. L’obiettivo finale è quello di introdurre nuovi concetti di reattore per i microbiomi e condurre valutazioni della produzione per lo sfruttamento futuro.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologymetabolic engineering
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterials
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiology
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinatore
04318 Leipzig
Germania