Microbial associations for bioremediation. What does “microbial consortia” mean?

MASSOT, FRANCISCO; BERNARD, NATHALIE; ALVAREZ, LUCAS M. MARTINEZ; MARTORELL, MARÍA M.; MAC CORMACK, WALTER P.; RUBERTO, LUCAS A. M.

APPLIED MICROBIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY

SPRINGER

Año: 2022

0175-7598

Microbial associations arise as useful tools in several biotechnological processes. Among them, bioremediation of contaminated environments usually takes advantage of these microbial associations. Despite being frequently used, these associations are indicated using a variety of expressions, showing a lack of consensus by specialists in the feld. The main idea of this work is to analyze the variety of microbial associations referred to as ?microbial consortia? (MC) in the context of pollutants biodegradation and bioremediation. To do that, we summarize the origin of the term pointing out the features that an MC is expected to meet, according to the opinion of several authors. An analysis of related bibliography was done seeking criteria to rationalize and classify MC in the context of bioremediation. We identify that the microbe?s origin and the level of human intervention are usually considered as a category to classify them as natural microbial consortia (NMC), artifcial microbial consortia (AMC), and synthetic microbial consortia (SMC). In this sense, NMC are those associations composed by microorganisms obtained from a single source while AMC members come from diferent sources. SMC are a class of AMC in which microbial composition is defned to accomplish a certain specifc task. We propose that the efectiveor potential existence of the interaction among MC members in the source material should be considered as a category in the classifcation as well, in combination with the origin of the source and level of intervention. Cross-kingdom MC and new developments were also considered. Finally, the existence of grey zones in the limits between each proposed microbial consortia category is addressed.