Microbial production of valuable chemicals by modular co-culture strategy

Nowadays, microbial synthesis has become a common way for producing valuable chemicals. Traditionally, microbial production of valuable chemicals is accomplished by a single strain. For the purpose of increasing the production titer and yield of a recombinant strain, complicated pathways and regulation layers should be fine-tuned, which also brings a heavy metabolic burden to the host. In addition, utilization of various complex and mixed substrates further interferes with the normal growth of the host strain and increases the complexity of strain engineering. As a result, modular co-culture technology, which aims to divide a target complex pathway into separate modules located at different single strains, poses an alternative solution for microbial production. Recently, modular co-culture strategy has been employed for the synthesis of different natural products. Therefore, in this review, various chemicals produced with application of co-cultivation technology are summarized, including co-culture with same species or different species, and regulation of population composition between the co-culture members. In addition, development prospects and challenges of this promising field are also addressed, and possible solution for these issues were also provided.