Microbial co-culturing strategies for the production high value compounds, a reliable framework towards sustainable biorefinery implementation – an overview

•The co-culture systems for the development of novel biomolecules.•The co-culture systems are an option for working in scale-up of process.•The quorum sensing is responsible of cell behavior in response to population.•The synthetic biology allows to control the behavior microbial consortia.•The technology of co-culture systems allows development of a circular economy. The microbial co-cultures or consortia are a natural set of microorganisms formed from different species or the same species but different strains, in which members can interact with each other. The co-culture systems have wide variety of technological applications such as the production of foods, treatment of wastewater, removal of toxic substances, environmental recovery, and all these without the need to work in sterile conditions. Therefore, the need of understanding communication mechanisms between cell-to-cell within co-culture will allow to construct and to program their biological behavior from the use of complex substrates to produce biocompounds. The technology of co-culture systems enables the development of biorefinery platforms to obtain biofuels, and high value compounds through biomass transformation by sustainable process. This review focuses on understanding the roles of consortia microbial to design and built co-culture systems to produce high value compounds in terms a sustainable biorefinery.