Overview
The vast majority of microbes in the environment live in close association with one another in mixed communities. These communities maintain high levels of complex interactions exchanging nutrients, vitamins and other chemicals. The microbes in these mixed communities therefore function very differently from microbes isolated in pure cultures in the laboratory, producing phenotypes unable to be replicated in one individual cell type. Thus, complex microbial communities and their interactions must be studied as a whole to fully understand their properties and dynamic relationships.
Through Ontario Genomics’ SPARK program, Elizabeth Edwards and Radhakrishnan Mahadevan at the University of Toronto are developing computational models using microbial genomes and metagenomes to identify metabolic gaps pointing to nutrients or vitamins (metabolites) that are exchanged between members of a microbial community. The team will then further validate these predictions experimentally using an anaerobic subsurface mixed microbial community that contains microbes used for bioremediation of toxic chlorinated solvents such as chloroform.
The knowledge gained from this project will serve to not only boost the efficiency of dechlorination in groundwater remediation, but will also resolve metabolic gaps in genome-scale models at the microbial community level. This will pave the way for other applications to uncover metabolic interactions in complex microbial communities such as in the human gut and in deep marine sediments, which are intractable using pure culture studies.