Constructing microbial consortia with minimal growth using a genetic algorithm

The processes occurring in microbial ecosystems are typically governed by the actions of many different microorganisms that can all interact with each other in a highly nonlinear way. Historically, most work in microbiology has been focused on pure cultures of single organisms, while the study of groups of organisms (consortia) still forms a major challenge. Although genetic algorithms are capable of optimising noisy and nonlinear systems and they should therefore be very well suited for studying microbial ecology, they have only rarely been used in this field. In this work, a genetic algorithm was successfully used to construct microbial consortia exhibiting minimal growth from separate isolated fast growing strains. The technique developed here may open the way to new ecological insights.