Microbial Multispecies Symbiosis: A Panomics View

Abstract

Symbiosis offers a technique to overcome the constraints placed on indi­vidual microbes. This is demonstrated in natural communities by symbioses like lichens and biofilms resilient to disturbances, an essential characteristic in changing environments. At the same time, microalgae undertake an array of mutualistic inter­actions with bacteria. Here, we discuss how the addition of microbiological and biochemical investigations to transcriptomic, metagenomic, and metabolomic tech­niques has helped us better understand the algal–bacterial interactions. In synthetic consortia, microorganisms adapted from the natural world or created through syn­thetic biology to interact are controlled by external factors. The traditional theory of dual symbiosis, which showed host-specific bacterial microbiomes, has been ques­tioned by recent microbiome research. Recent findings about bacterial associations with lichen symbioses support the idea that they are multispecies symbioses. While numerous abiotic and biotic variables can also affect the bacterial community struc­ture, panomics techniques have demonstrated the functional relevance of the bacte­rial microbiome to the whole lichen meta-organism. It has recently come to light that several photobionts and bacteria connected to lichens produce a variety of potentially valuable compounds. The abundance of biological and chemical variety within the lichen holobiome is becoming clearer due to the application of multi-omics techniques, genomics, mass spectrometry, and other analytical technologies. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024.