Eco-Mimicry Opens New Doors for Bioprocess Engineers

The natural world blends microenvironments to create a continuum of spatial niches wherein microbial consortia participate in metabolic exchanges. The capability with which nature selects a consortium to complement a given niche is often taken for granted. Not by Shahab et al. (2020), however, who created a synthetic microbial consortium to mediate a multi-step bioprocess in a single bioreactor system. The concept affords a fair degree of modularity in the choice of biocatalyst and a reasonable level of process control, thus making it an engineering tool.