Microbes and Minds: A Powerful Partnership
The SPP 2170 'InterZell' Conference in Berlin 2025 showcased ten projects focused on their research progress in gas fermentation, co-cultures, population studies, and scale-up efforts. The agenda featured additional keynote speakers Prof. Alfred Spormann, Stanford University and Dr. Rinke van Tatenhove-Pel, TU Delft. Throughout the event, discussions centered on microbial and synthetic consortia interactions, heterogeneity, performance, reaction cascade and scale-up, aiming to advance sustainable bioprocessing and future research directions.
SPP 2170 uses the Power of Cooperation and Networking
We sincerely thank our team, the presenters, our keynote speaker, the board and Prof. Ralf Takors, speaker of the DFG SPP 2170 InterZell.
When Microbes Team Up in Communities
The cooperation of microbial communities overcomes the limitations of individual organisms and could accelerates innovation potential, following the example of nature, where 95% of all organisms occur in communities. Co-culture of microbes in bioreactors can enable the efficient, sustainable production of materials, nutrients, and medicines with a significantly reduced ecological footprint. Microbes have been used in food production for thousands of years in bread or yogurt. However, the potential for food, medical products or climate-neutral goods is far from exhausted.
The Making of Violacein by Co-Cultures
The example of Violacein, a purple active ingredient with antibiotic properties, already shows that microbes in co-cultures can produce products cleanly, scalable, and energy-efficiently, opening up new applications in medicine and biotechnology. The project MiMiCry follows the example of the nature to produce Violacein with synthetic co-cultures of different Escherichia coli.
CO₂-Fixing Alliances and Gas Fermentation
If CO2 is no longer seen as a problem but as a raw material, bioplastics, platform chemicals, or primary alcohols can be produced through the use of microorganisms, which uses CO2. This will reduce fossil resources, use energy more efficiently, and close ecological cycles. Microbially produced, carbon-neutral biofuels can stabilize the balance between renewable energies and mobility. Our projects SynCoClos, producing medium chain alcohols using CO/CO2; PebCascade producing ethyl butyrate and CaproSyn producing caproic acid are examples for co-cultures in gas fermentation.
Microbial Teams Behind Bioplastics
The project CoCoNut (cell-cell interactions in synthetic co-culture PHA production using sunlight and CO2 in an artificial co-culture), is pursuing the idea of cultivating two partner organisms together in a bioreactor for bioplastic. The researchers simulate an ecological balance in which an autotrophic microorganism, i.e., one that lives on sunlight and CO2, supplies its tandem partner with sugar and metabolites, a well-known principle in nature. CoCoNut successfully showed how cyanobacteria Synechococcus elongatus, with the help of sunlight through photosynthesis, can fix CO2 and supply other microorganisms. When under stress (e.g., salt stress), the bacterium produces more sugar, such as sucrose, transported out of the cell by the genetically modified bacteria, available to a heterotrophic soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida, known as producer of bioplastics.
Microbial Co-Cultures: Impact and Outlook
The biotechnological use of microbes creates a living platform on which pharmaceuticals, bioplastics, and green fuels can be produced more efficiently, cleanly, and sustainably. Using CO2 as a resource, recycling resources, promoting climate-friendly technologies: science and practice are merging to create a new industrial history that is making its way from the laboratory bench directly into our everyday lives. This marks the beginning of a new research journey with concrete benefits for the environment, health, and the economy, leveraging microbial teamwork and the ‘InterZell’ research network.
Behind the Scenes: The Team That Makes It Happen
'InterZell’ is a priority program involving 10 projects across Germany with approximately international 50 researchers funded by the German research foundation (DFG). The DFG SPP 2170 ‘InterZell’ presented these newest research findings at the conference in Berlin.
