Engineering Microbial Consortia towards Bioremediation

Bioremediation is a sustainable remediation technology as it utilizes microorganisms to convert hazardous compounds into their less toxic or non-toxic constituent elements. This technology has achieved some success in the past decades; however, factors involving microbial consortia, such as microbial assembly, functional interactions, and the role of member species, hinder its development. Microbial consortia may be engineered to reconfigure metabolic pathways and reprogram social interactions to get the desired function, thereby providing solutions to its inherent problems. The engineering of microbial consortia is commonly applied for the commercial production of biomolecules. However, in the field of bioremediation, the engineering of microbial consortia needs to be emphasized. In this review, we will discuss the molecular and ecological mechanisms of engineering microbial consortia with a particular focus on metabolic cross-feeding within species and the transfer of metabolites. We also discuss the advantages and limitations of top-down and bottom-up approaches of engineering microbial consortia and their applications in bioremediation.