Investigating the Role of Optogenetics in Modulating Microbial Consortia Ratios and Optimizing Phenylpropanoid Production

Abstract

Current modes of chemical commodity production have brought up a vast array of economic, environmental, and sustainability issues or concerns. However, to bypass many of these current issues of chemical production, microbial biosynthesis that utilizes inexpensive and renewable feedstocks are being studied for production of chemical commodities instead. In previous studies, biosynthetic pathways were discovered that could be introduced into E. coli to produce phenylpropanoids, particularly eugenol, from a glucose and glycerol feed. Modularization of this pathway, meaning breaking up the pathway across multiple strains of E. coli, and allowing bioproduction to occur under this tripartite E. coli coculture found significantly higher yields of eugenol relative to their respective monoculture. To improve upon this discovery of utilizing cocultures to optimize phenylpropanoid production, optogenetics was applied to this consortia system to determine if further optimizations could be accomplished by controlling the growth of each E. coli strain under their respective light conditions. While more experimentation needs to be conducted in order to find optimal light conditions that yield maximal phenylpropanoid titers, there is currently promising data that utilizing optogenetics in these co-cultures can further optimize phenylpropanoid production relative to the control co-culture system. Overall, pending further research, promising data is present towards the applicability of optogenetics in furthering microbial biosynthesis as a sustainable alternative in the production of chemical commodities like phenylpropanoids.