Utilization of microbial cocultures for converting mixed substrates to valuable bioproducts

Utilization of microbial cocultures has been found to be a powerful approach for biochemical production. Cultivation of microbial co-culturescocultures on mixed substrates provides new opportunities and flexibility to control the growth and biosynthesis behavior of coculture members, and thus adds a new dimension for microbial coculture engineering. More generally, recruitment of microbial cocultures allows for efficient utilization of substrates to produce complex end products, which is challenging to achieve by monoculture approaches, which has been the traditional microbial engineering approach. To this end, significant achievements have been made in recent years to advance this new approach in metabolic engineering. In this review, we highlight representative groups of bioproducts that are produced from mixed substrates using various microbial cocultures. The challenges and opportunities of this approach are also discussed.