Microbial consortia within biofilms are frequently found in structured organization in nature and are thought to bear great potential for productive biotechnological applications, such as the degradation of complex substrates, biosensing, or the production of chemical compounds. However, in-depth understanding of their organizational principles, as well as comprehensive design criteria of structured microbial consortia for industrial applications are still limited. It is hypothesized that biomaterial engineering of such consortia within scaffolds can advance the field by providing defined in vitro mimics of naturally occurring and industrially applicable biofilms. Such systems will allow for adjustment of important microenvironmental parameters and in-depth analysis with high temporal and spatial resolution. In this review, we provide the background of biomaterial engineering of structured biofilm consortia, show approaches for their design, and demonstrate tools to analyze their metabolic state.
Section snippetsBackground: nature's approach of structured microbial consortia in biofilms and a biomaterial-based roadmap for enabling technologiesMicrobial cells and their occurrence in consortia in biofilms are widely distributed and diversified modes of life on earth. Such consortia are an essential part of biogeochemical cycling of most elements in water, soil, sediment, and subsurface environments. They colonize higher organisms such as plants and animals and access technical systems by surface biofouling in process and drinking water production, surface corrosion of ships, and medical devices. Phototrophic microbial mats are one
Biomaterial engineering to structure and control microbial consortiaAs pointed out above, structured microbial consortia in biofilms exhibit a very high complexity of involved parameters. Therefore, they are difficult to be mimicked in engineered model systems. Hence, up to now, simplified model systems mimic only a limited number of microbial interactions happening in the natural system. However, this way, the studied microorganisms can behave unpredictably, evolve into nondesired states, and do not allow to model and manipulate the system as might be desired.
In situ analysis of microenvironmental parameters in structured microbial consortiaStructured microbial consortia are defined by chemical (e.g. carbon dioxide, oxygen, pH, ionic, nutrient composition, and available electron acceptors and donors) and physical (e.g. temperature, pressure, mechanical properties of ECM, light quality, and quantity) environmental parameters [33]. In order to unveil the ‘dark matter of biofilm’ and engineer new biotechnologies based on structured microbial consortia, novel analytical techniques are needed to analyze the abovementioned fundamental
Conclusion and outlookBy learning from nature, biomaterial-based approaches are a promising strategy to mimic, modulate, and understand the physiology and application schemes of structured microbial consortia. The strategy bears great potential for microbial research and biotechnology. Although underexplored and applied so far, the usage of concepts from biomedical engineering, in particular the application of hydrogel materials and their transfer to microbial- related parameter spaces and material classes, is
CRediT authorship contribution statementMatthias Portius: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Christian Danneberg: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Tilo Pompe: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Conflict of interest statementThe authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
AcknowledgementsT.P. acknowledges the support from Federal Ministry of Economy and Climate Preservation, BMWK (Germany) and Sächsische Aufbaubank, SAB (Free State of Saxony, Germany) within the STARK program (project no. 46SKD023X) and from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (grant: PO 713/13-1). Schematic visualizations were created with BioRender software.
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