A microbial consortium is defined as two or more microbial groups living symbiotically. Such consortia can be used for environmental remediation, fuel production, etc., and can, in principle, perform more complicated tasks and with greater robustness than monocultures. However, a consortium can also exhibit internal competition, with one group eventually dominating, and so stability can be challenging to achieve. This project will investigate the possibility of consortia behavior from a single microbe genotype that is, a single species that has the capacity to switch between different metabolic states such that the population exhibits a phenotypic equilibrium characteristic of a multi-species consortia. We propose to bring together a microbial system under development in the Elowitz lab with single cell analysis platforms developed in the Heath lab in an initial study to enable this goal.