Paper accepted: “Synthetic Escherichia coli-Corynebacterium glutamicum consortia for L-lysine production from starch and sucrose”

Today, the first joint paper from our collaborative research and development project F2F has been accepted for publication in the Journal “Bioresource Technology”. It is co-authored by the three doctoral candidates involved in our project, namely Elvira Sgobba from Prof. Wendisch’s group in Bielefeld, Anna Stumpf from Prof. Philipp’s group in Microbiology, and Marina Vortmann from our group. The general theme of the F2F project is the development of microbial communities for biotechnology. While in nature, complex metabolic conversions of substrates, both in catabolism and anabolism, are often the result of collaborative activities of different microbial species, today’s biotechnology largely relies on single microbial strains acting in isolation. Our project aims to establish a community of two bacterial strains that can be co-cultivated and collaborate in the conversion of a simple substrate from a waste stream such as chitin from crab shell wastes into a value-added product such as amino acids. The current manuscript describes the successful establishment of a first and rather simple such consortium. More complex ones are to come!