Production of Chemicals Using Microbial Consortia

The global alteration to achieve advancement in green chemistry improved awareness of biological systems for manufacturing chemicals, fuels, and valuable compounds. The microbial consortia are known as the group of interrelated microorganisms that increased the substantial curiosity for their competence to expand the efficacy, flexibility, and adaptability of different biotic processes, as they can simplify a number of metabolic functions between different species, which help to allow a number of intricate biochemical changes that are often not possible to achieve with only a single organism. This chapter scrutinizes the construction, improvement, and applied practice of microbial consortia for making different chemicals on the industrial scale. Several model species, including Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Bacillus subtilis, and Escherichia coli have particular functions in the production of chemicals. The microbial consortia produce an extensive variety of compounds, such as organic acids, bio-alcohols, hydrocarbons, and other chemicals that are important to different industries such as food, pharmaceuticals, and energy. In addition, synthetic biology tools such as quorum sensing modules, gene circuits, and CRISPR-Cas9 systems are used for engineeringmetabolic division of labor and interspecies communication. However, despite these advantages, population dynamics, consortium stability, and scaling up the production system for industrial purposes remain problematic. In order to overcome these problems,in vivo monitoring in real-time, process optimization, and bioreactor design are explored.