Cooperation in microbial communities and their biotechnological applications

Cavaliere, M, Feng, S, Soyer, O and Jimenez, Jose (2017) Cooperation in microbial communities and their biotechnological applications Environmental Microbiology and Environmental Microbiology Reports, 19 (8). pp. 2949-2963.

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Abstract

Microbial communities are increasingly utilised in biotechnology. Efficiency and productivity in many of these applications depends on the presence of cooperative interactions between members of the community. Two key processes underlying these interactions are the production of public goods and metabolic crossfeeding, which can be understood in the general framework of ecological and evolutionary (eco-evo) dynamics. In this review we illustrate the relevance of cooperative interactions in microbial biotechnological processes, discuss their mechanistic origins, and analyse their evolutionary resilience. Cooperative behaviours can be damaged by the emergence of ‘cheating’ cells that benefit from the cooperative interactions but do not contribute to them. Despite this, cooperative interactions can be stabilized by spatial segregation, by the presence of feedbacks between the evolutionary dynamics and the ecology of the community, by the role of regulatory systems coupled to the environmental conditions and by the action of horizontal gene transfer. Cooperative interactions enrich microbial communities with a higher degree of robustness against environmental stress and can facilitate the evolution of more complex traits. Therefore, the evolutionary resilience of microbial communities and their ability to constraint detrimental mutants should be considered in order to design robust biotechnological applications.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects :	Biosciences and Medicine
Divisions :	Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences > School of Biosciences and Medicine
Authors :	Name Email ORCID Cavaliere, M Feng, S Soyer, O Jimenez, Jose j.jimenez@surrey.ac.uk
Date :	29 May 2017
Identification Number :	10.1111/1462-2920.13767
Copyright Disclaimer :	Copyright 2017 The Authors. Environmental Microbiology published by Society for Applied Microbiology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Related URLs :	Publisher
Additional Information :	Special Issue on Microbiome and Microbial Community Ecology
Depositing User :	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited :	26 Apr 2017 08:58
Last Modified :	06 Feb 2018 13:00
URI:	http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/id/eprint/814029

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