Design, analysis and application of synthetic microbial consortia

The rapid development of synthetic biology has conferred almost perfect modification on single cells, and provided methodological support for synthesizing microbial consortia, which have a much wider application potential than synthetic single cells. Co-cultivating multiple cell populations with rational strategies based on interacting relationships within natural microbial consortia provides theoretical as well as experimental support for the successful obtaining of synthetic microbial consortia, promoting it into extensive research on both industrial applications in plenty of areas and also better understanding of natural microbial consortia. According to their composition complexity, synthetic microbial consortia are summarized in three aspects in this reviewand are discussed in principles of design and construction, insights and methods for analysis, and applications in energy, healthcare, etc. (c) 2016 The authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).