# Unravelling the molecular basis of metabolic interactions in synthetic consortia dedicated for bio-H2 production

Louis Delecourt, Magali Roger, Pascale Infossi, Christophe Bordi,
Marie-Thérèse Giudici-Orticoni

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Louis Delecourt, Magali Roger, Pascale Infossi, Christophe Bordi, Marie-Thérèse Giudici-Orticoni. Unravelling the molecular basis of metabolic interactions in synthetic consortia dedicated for bio-H2 production. Biochimica biophysica acta (BBA) - Bioenergetics, 2022, 1863 (S.), pp.148825. 10.1016/j.bbabio.2022.148825. hal-03846181

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Submitted on 31 Jan 2023

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
**Louis DELECOURT**<fnref n="1" />,<fnref n="2" />, **Magali ROGER**<fnref n="1" />, **Pascale INFOSSI**<fnref n="1" />, **Christophe BORDI**<fnref n="2" />,
**Marie-Thérèse GIUDICI-ORTICONI**<fnref n="1" />.

Email adress: ldelecourt@imm.cnrs.fr

Unravelling the molecular basis of metabolic interactions in synthetic consortia
dedicated for bio-H₂ production.

Nowadays, it is well established that microbes live in the form of complex
communities that sense their environment, communicate between members and
exchange biological materials. This microbial cooperation often allows new function
or better performance of the whole community not predictable via genome analysis.
Understanding the metabolic interdependence in microbial communities becomes an
important challenge to decipher the microbial behavior at the community scale, but
also to unlock alternative pathways as for the biotechnological use. Based on the
model of microbial biomass degradation which in Nature involved various anaerobic
bacteria that sequentially degrade complex organic matter into H, CO₂, CO or CH₄,
previous research in the group led to the construction of simplified models (also
called co-culture) [1] [2]. Two synthetic co-cultures composed of *Desulfovibrio vulgaris* (*DvH*) and *Clostridium acetobutylicum* (or *Escherichia coli*) are used to
investigate the metabolic interdependence between microbes. In both co-cultures,
under nutritional stress conditions, cell-to-cell interactions were shown to occur
between bacteria allowing bidirectional exchange of biological materials. These
interactions are essential for *D. vulgaris* growth. Interestingly, this also led to increase
bio-hydrogen production. The establishment of the physical interactions is crucial and
depends on the Al-2 quorum sensing (QS) molecules produced by *D. vulgaris*'
partners. To get insight the different mechanisms as the communication, the physical
interactions, the cross feeding (allowing *D. vulgaris* to resume growing under
starvation) global approaches as transcriptomic, proteomic, and targeted metabolite
analysis are in progress. Here we show the breakthrough on the communication
mechanism achieved by bioinformatics approach.

[1] D. Ranava, C. Backes, G. Karthikeyan, O. Ouari, A. Soric, M. Guiral, M.L. Cárdenas, M.T. Giudici-Orticoni, Metabolic Exchange and Energetic Coupling between Nutritionally Stressed Bacterial Species: Role of Quorum-Sensing Molecules, MBio. 12 (2021) e02758-20. https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.02758-20.

[2] S. Benomar, D. Ranava, M.L. Cárdenas, E. Trably, Y. Rafrafi, A. Ducret, J. Hamelin, E. Lojou, J.-P. Steyer, M.T. Giudici-Orticoni, Nutritional stress induces exchange of cell material and energetic coupling between bacterial species, Nat Commun. 6 (2015) 6283. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7283.

<footnote n="1">¹CNRS, BIP, Aix Marseille Univ, Marseille, France</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²CNRS, LISM, Aix Marseille Univ, Marseille, France</footnote>