# Adapting OptCouple to Identify Strategies with Increased Product Yields in Community Cohorts of E. coli

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a computational method to design microbial communities that work together to produce more chemicals efficiently.

## Contribution

A new computational approach for identifying metabolic modifications in microbial communities to increase chemical yields.

## Key findings

- The approach uncovers strategies to couple chemical production with microbial community growth.
- Designed communities achieve higher yields than single chassis organisms.
- Stable co-dependent communities are engineered for industrial platform chemicals.

## Abstract

Background: Microbesas chemical factories provide an alternative sustainable approach for producing platform chemicals. Until recently, most efforts have involved engineering heterologous pathways into a single microbial chassis to maximise its production of a target chemical. More recently, cohorts of microbes have been used to engineer microbial communities to achieve higher yields than achieved in a single chassis.

Methods: In this paper, we present a computational approach to identify sets of metabolic modifications that create stable co-dependent communities of micro-organisms and improve the chemical yield of these communities. We demonstrate our approach by designing communities which produce industrially relevant platform chemicals.

Results: We show that our approach is able to uncover metabolic engineering strategies for coupling these target chemicals to the growth of stable community cohorts.