Fig. 3

Applications of engineered microbial consortia. A Example of a two-strain microbial consortium for metabolic pathway engineering. Strain one breaks down polysaccharides and lyses to release the monosaccharides and QS signals which induce conversion of the monosaccharide to a final product. Adapted from Honjo et al. [59]. B Schematic of biofilm productivity as a function of starting ratio between strains expressing EPS or TasA. The biofilm productivity can be tuned by using different starting ratios. At its maximum, the synthetic consortium biofilm productivity is greater than the wild-type consortium. Adapted from Dragoš et al. [28]. C An implementation of an AND-XOR logic gate. This implementation uses 7 cells and 4 communication signals. Cells 1 through 6 are NOR gates, so if a signal molecule is present they will be OFF. Cell 7 is a buffer, so either signal from cell 5 or 6 is shown as the output. To the right of the logic gate is a schematic showing the implementation of one set of inputs for the system. Adapted from Du et al. [16]