Communities of Niche-Optimized Strains: Small-Genome Organism Consortia in Bioproduction

Bacterial genome reduction is a common phenomenon in nature that has also inspired several projects with biotechnologically relevant organisms. In many cases, however, no performance improvements with the streamlined chassis were obtained. A comparative analysis of natural and synthetic reduced genomes and their corresponding ecological niches reveals that: (i) deleting expressed genes can lead to noticeable energy conservation usable for improved biomass or product synthesis; and (ii) the simplified strains depend on the environment (e.g., another community member) to complement deleted functions. Based on this analysis, we introduce the concept of Community of Niche-optimized Strains (CoNoS) as an alternative strategy to generate superior biotechnological production processes.