Instituto Antártico Argentino (IAA), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Instituto de Nanobiotecnología (NANOBIOTEC, UBA-CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Appl Microbiol Biotechnol. 2022 Apr;106(7):2283-2297. doi: 10.1007/s00253-022-11864-8. Epub 2022 Mar 16.
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 field. 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), artificial 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 different sources. SMC are a class of AMC in which microbial composition is defined to accomplish a certain specific task. We propose that the effective or potential existence of the interaction among MC members in the source material should be considered as a category in the classification 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. KEY POINTS: • Microbial consortia for bioremediation can be obtained through different methods. • The use of the term "microbial consortia" is unclear in the specialized literature. • We propose a simplified classification for microbial consortia for bioremediation.
微生物共生体在许多生物技术过程中被用作有用的工具。在这些过程中，受污染环境的生物修复通常利用这些微生物共生体。尽管这些共生体经常被使用，但它们的使用方式多种多样，表明该领域的专家对此缺乏共识。这项工作的主要目的是分析在污染物生物降解和生物修复背景下被称为“微生物群落”（MC）的微生物共生体的多样性。为此，我们总结了术语的起源，指出了根据几位作者的观点，MC 应该具备的特征。通过分析相关文献，寻求了合理化和分类 MC 的标准，以便将其置于生物修复的背景下。我们发现微生物的起源和人为干预的程度通常被认为是对其进行分类的一个标准，将其分为自然微生物群落（NMC）、人工微生物群落（AMC）和合成微生物群落（SMC）。在这种情况下，NMC 是由单一来源获得的微生物组成的共生体，而 AMC 的成员来自不同的来源。SMC 是 AMC 的一个类别，其中微生物的组成是为了完成特定的任务而定义的。我们提出，在源材料中 MC 成员之间相互作用的有效或潜在存在也应该被视为分类的一个标准，与源的起源和干预程度相结合。我们还考虑了跨界微生物共生体和新的发展。最后，讨论了在每个提出的微生物共生体类别之间的界限上存在的灰色地带。关键点：
用于生物修复的微生物共生体可以通过不同的方法获得。
术语“微生物共生体”在专业文献中使用不明确。
我们提出了一种用于生物修复的微生物共生体的简化分类法。
