Chapter 14 The Characterization of Living Bacterial Colonies Using

Abstract

Engineered microbial consortia are of growing interest to a range of scientists including bioprocess engineers, systems biologists, and microbiologists because of their ability to simultaneously optimize multiple tasks, to test fundamental systems science, and to understand the microbial ecology of environments like chronic wounds. Metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, and microbial ecology provide a sound scientifi c basis for designing, building, and analyzing consortium-based microbial platforms. This chapter outlines strategies and protocols useful for (1) in silico network design, (2) experimental strain construction, (3) consortia culturing including biofi lm growth methods, and (4) physiological characterization of consortia. The laboratory and computational methods given here may be adapted for synthesis and characterization of other engineered consortia designs.