A teaspoon of sewage sludge contains billions of microbes that, working together, can turn organic waste into methane gas—but no one knows exactly how to make them do it faster or more reliably. This project tackles a fundamental gap in biology: scientists understand individual microbes well, but they have little grasp of how entire microbial communities organise themselves, stay stable, or break down. The researchers will focus on biomethane-producing communities—the mixed populations of bacteria and archaea that digest waste in anaerobic digesters. They will take two approaches: optimising natural communities already found in digesters, and building entirely synthetic communities from scratch in the lab. If successful, the work could transform how the UK produces renewable energy. Biomethane is an alternative fuel for heating, transport, and electricity generation, but current production is inefficient and unpredictable. A deeper understanding of community structure and function could allow engineers to design digesters that produce more gas, more consistently, from less waste. This is primarily fundamental science. The team will generate the first systematic genomic and transcriptomic dataset of a complex microbial community over time, and develop computational tools for community redesign. Past fundamental work on microbial communities has already enabled wastewater treatment and industrial fermentation; this project could lay the groundwork for the next generation of bioenergy systems.
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Complex microbial communities underlie natural processes such as global chemical cycles and digestion in higher animals, and are routinely exploited for industrial scale synthesis, waste treatment and fermentation. Our basic understanding of the structures, stabilities and functions of such communities is limited, leading to the declaration of their study as the next frontier in microbial ecology, microbiology, and synthetic biology. Focusing on biomethane producing microbial communities (BMCs), we will undertake a two-tiered approach of optimising natural communities and designing synthetic communities with a focus on achieving robust, high-yield biomethane production. Within this biotechnological framework, our proposal will address several fundamental scientific questions on the link between the structure and function of microbial communities. To ensure success in this challenging project, we assembled the strongest possible interdisciplinary research team that combines significant practical and scientific expertise in microbial ecology and evolution, systems modelling, molecular microbiology, bioengineering, genomics, and synthetic biology. We are confident that this team will deliver and that this project will result in significant impact in the scientific and industrial domains. Through our work, described in detail below, we will; significantly improve the current understanding of the structure-function relation in microbial communities, provide the scientific community with a systematic, temporal genomics and transcriptomics dataset on complex microbial communities, develop novel computational tools for microbial community (re)design, and experimentally build synthetic BMCs that will act as model ecosystems in different research fields. These scientific developments, in turn, will accumulate in the development of more sustainable bioenergy solutions for the UK economy by optimising the communities underlying biomethane production. This will help to drive the efficiency of biomethane as an alternative fuel source.
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