Different co-culture approaches to increase metabolites in foods

Abstract Microbial co-cultures have emerged as effective methods for enhancing metabolite production, which surpass the limitations of traditional monoculture approaches by offering enhanced efficiency, lower costs, better stress resistance and more sophisticated processes execution. Co-cultivation strategies, such as microbial interactions, modular co-culture, and microbial communication, are gaining attention for their potential to enhance food-related metabolites. Nevertheless, studies investigating these methods directly within food matrices are significantly scarce. Therefore, this review highlighted various co-cultivation approaches for metabolite enhancement in foods, along with the challenges and future perspectives. The importance of using co-culture methodologies for increasing food metabolite production was demonstrated in this study. It was also indicated that co-culture systems still encounter problems like system complexity, stability and scale-up. Future research should prioritize combining advanced technologies with co-culture systems to overcome challenges, and applying co-culture approaches, especially engaging multi-strains, directly into the food matrices to uncover the whole potential of these strategies. Graphical Abstract