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US 12,698,244 B2Granted
Microbial consortia for soil improvement
AssigneePluton Biosciences, Inc.
InventorsBenjamin M. Wolf, Boahemaa Adu-Oppong, Steven C. Slater, Barry S. Goldman, Alexa Jewell Wagner, Nicholas Thomas Norman
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Abstract
Provided herein is technology relating to functional microbial consortia and particularly, but not exclusively, to methods and systems for producing a microbial consortium possessing a desired function and microbial consortia produced according to such methods. The microbial consortia may be used to improve soil, e.g., for agricultural uses.
Claims25
A method of producing a living microbial consortium that accumulates nitrogen in an agricultural medium, the method comprising:
- (a) providing an input sample produced from an environmental sample comprising a plurality of microbes;
- and
- (b) proceeding, starting with the input sample, to produce a microbial consortium using an iterative process comprising:
- (i) inoculating a fixed carbon-free and fixed nitrogen-free growth medium with the input sample to produce a culture;
- (ii) incubating the agricultural medium culture in the presence of nitrogen gas (N2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) gas and with illumination by a light source to produce an incubated culture;
- and
- (iii) measuring a phenotype of the incubated culture,
- with a portion of the incubated culture acting as the input sample for a next iteration of the iterative process until the phenotype is stable,
- wherein the microbial consortium comprises a plurality of living organisms comprising a cyanobacterium and the cyanobacterium abundance in the microbial consortium is greater than an abundance of the cyanobacterium abundance in the environmental sample;
- and
- wherein the microbial consortium fixes nitrogen.
8 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.