We have just published the 4th paper in our sequel story on Lactobacillus plantarum metabolic engineering!
We have termed it “Rapid adaptation for fiber degradation by changes in plasmid stoichiometry within Lactobacillus plantarum at the synthetic community level “as we found that microbes can increase their fiber degradation capability as a community if they are synthetically evolved in the laboratory to do that.
This story in fact began in 2011 when I first met Itzik and agreed to work with him on this ambitious project: turn a bacteria into a fiber degrader.
We did succeed in equipping the bacteria with cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic capabilities and make the cells assemble elaborate macro-molecular structures on their cell wall, rendering them able to attach and degrade their substrate.
The important point we made in these series of papers was not to perform all the genetic modifications in a single strain but rather to engineer different strains and make them work together as a community in order to share the burden and ease on the cells. Whereby each stain is engineered to produce a specific component of the plant fiber degradation machinery and the different components self‐assemble on the surface of one of the strains.
In this last paper, we explored how the strains coevolve using an adaptive laboratory process where we grow them on plant fibers where they can grow if they cooperate to assemble the degradation machinery. We were excited to find that internal plasmid re‐arrangement in the bacterial community served to increase significantly enzymatic performance.
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13584