A new body of research, published in Nature Communications , suggests synthetic biology could help to better characterize complex microbial communities, unlocking their potential for industrial and medical biotechnology. Communities of microorganisms control many of Earth’s most important environmental processes. For example, photosynthetic ocean microbes produce at least 50 percent of the world’s oxygen, communities of root-associated bacteria ‘fix’ nitrogen from the atmosphere to make it available to plants, and microbial communities in the stomachs of farm animals enable them to breakdown tough cellulose from their plant diets. “Most of these microbes are difficult to grow and study in the laboratory, and for most of scientific history have been a kind of ‘biological dark matter’, " says co-author Dr. Tom Williams, an associate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and Macquarie University research fellow. However, with the advent of ...