Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory used EMSL capabilities to better understand how microbes connect to form cooperative communities to utilize energy and nutrients in their environment. A recent paper in the Journal of Cellular Physiology offers a new method to model and predict the metabolic interactions across species in microbial communities. The research team's new approach reconstructs metabolic networks using readily collectable community-level data that focuses on direct predictions of a community's interspecies metabolic interactions. The team's findings could be useful for designing and engineering microbial communities for controllable outputs such as biofuels and biochemicals.
Read more from PNNL's Biological Sciences Division.
Reference: Henry CS, Bernstein HC, Weisenhorn P, Taylor RC, Lee J-Y, Zucker J, Song H-S. 2016. "Microbial Community Metabolic Modeling: A Community Data-Driven Network Reconstruction." Journal of Cellular Physiology, in press. DOI: 10.1002/jcp.25428.