Ethanol-tolerant microorganisms

Efficient pit mud screening

This Raman-based screen-before-culture approach directly isolates highly ethanol-tolerant living cells from complex microbiomes, bypassing tedious plating steps.

Xu, Teng · Sun, Qing · Jing, Gongchao · Wang, Xiaogang · Xinyun, Yi · Changle, Wu · Zhu, Huiyi · Ma, Bo · Xu, Jian · Zhang, Jia · Wang, Xixian · Zheng, Xiaowei

Bioresource Technology 2026

Specifications

Sorting throughput

{'zh': '2400', 'en': '2400'} cells/h

Sorting accuracy

{'zh': '91.3', 'en': '91.3'} %

Enrichment improvement

{'zh': '4.5', 'en': '4.5'}

Assessment efficiency increase

{'zh': '6.86', 'en': '6.86'}

Advantages

High throughput and accuracy

The microfluidic optical tweezers-based RACS system achieves a throughput of ~2400 cells/h and a 91.3% sorting accuracy, greatly improving screening efficiency.

High enrichment efficiency

Compared to conventional methods, the enrichment of ethanol-tolerant cells is improved 4.5-fold, with 177 highly metabolic active cells obtained in a single sorting run.

Excellent strain performance

All 6 isolates obtained after sorting showed strong tolerance to 8% ethanol in a 7 h assessment, whereas conventional screening achieved only 2 out of 9 success.

Applications

• microbial chassis screening：Directly obtain stress-tolerant chassis cells from microbiomes without preculture.
• industrial strain development：High-throughput mining of tolerant strains accelerates industrial strain development.
• fermentation engineering：Screening ethanol-tolerant strains improves robustness of fermentation processes.