A Generic Strategy to Maintain Stable, Multi-Member Microbial Consortia

Microbial community is spotlighted recently in metabolic engineering applications, since it has many benefits such as combining strengths of multiple microbial species, accelerating strain development, and reducing metabolic burden on microbial workhorse. Despite the increasing attention from the relevant field, there are still some technical limitations on establishing stable microbial consortia, a feature required for developing industrially relevant processes. For example, current strategies to maintain stable co-culture often require use of certain carbon substrates. Here, we report a generic strategy to maintain stable cell ratio of multi-member co-culture. The qPCR based method we established for quantifying cell number in multi-member co-culture should also be useful to this community.