Human gut microbe co-cultures have greater potential than monocultures for food waste remediation to commodity chemicals.

ABSTRACT: Food waste represents an underutilized resource for commodity chemical generation. Constituents of the human gut microbiota that are already adapted to a food waste stream could be repurposed for useful chemical production. Industrial fermentations utilizing these microbes maintain organisms in isolation; however, microbial consortia offer an attractive alternative to monocultures in that metabolic interactions may result in more efficient processes with higher yields. Here we computationally assess the ability of co-cultures vs. monocultures to anaerobically convert a Western diet to commodity chemicals. The combination of genome-scale metabolic models with flux-balance analysis predicts that every organism analyzed can benefit from interactions with another microbe, as evidenced by incre

SUBMITTER: Perisin MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6197241 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature