Chinese researchers develop “top-down” synthetic microbiome strategy

In China, researchers from the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a “top-down” synthetic microbiome strategy to enrich microbial consortia capable of efficient lignin degradation from straw compost and straw-returning soils, providing new insight into how microbial communities work together to break down lignin. Their findings are published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

The researchers investigated the community composition, gene functions, and metabolic interactions of the consortia through a combination of high-throughput sequencing, metagenomic analyses, and metabolomic analyses. They found that Pseudomonas was the dominant genus in all three consortia. Among them, the consortium labeled R0 exhibited the highest degradation efficiency, successfully breaking down more than 80% of alkali lignin within six days.