Designing microbial communities to maximize the thermodynamic driving force for the production of chemicals.Microbial communities have become a major research focus due to their importance for biogeochemical cycles, biomedicine and biotechnological applications.  We then present ASTHERISC (Algorithmic Search of THERmodynamic advantages in Single-species Communities), a new computational approach for designing multi-strain communities of a single-species with the aim to divide a production pathway between different strains such that the thermodynamic driving force for product synthesis is maximized.  ASTHERISC exploits the fact that compartmentalization of segments of a product pathway in different strains can circumvent thermodynamic bottlenecks arising when operation of one reaction requires a metabolite with high and operation of another reaction the same metabolite with low concentration.  These calculations showed that, for each scenario, many target metabolites (products) exist where a multi-strain community can provide a thermodynamic advantage compared to a single strain solution.  In some cases, a production with sufficiently high yield is thermodynamically only feasible with a community. 
THERM