For thousands of years, humans have enjoyed the novel flavors, increased shelf-life, and
nutritional benefits that microbes provide in fermented foods and beverages. Recent …

Quantitatively linking the composition and function of microbial communities is a major
aspiration of microbial ecology. Microbial community functions emerge from a complex web …

Microbial communities frequently invade one another as a whole, a phenomenon known as
community coalescence. Despite its potential importance for the assembly, dynamics, and …

Non‐gene‐editing microbiome engineering (NgeME) is the rational design and control of
natural microbial consortia to perform desired functions. Traditional NgeME approaches use …

Microbiome breeding is a new artificial selection technique that seeks to change the genetic
composition of microbiomes in order to benefit plant or animal hosts. Recent experimental …

Environmental microbiome engineering is emerging as a potential avenue for climate
change mitigation. In this process, microbial inocula are introduced to natural microbial …

Directed evolution is a form of artificial selection that has been used for decades to find
biomolecules and organisms with new or enhanced functional traits. Directed evolution can …

The immeasurable complexity at every level of biological organization creates a daunting
task for understanding biological function. Here, we highlight the risks of stripping it away at …

Highlights•Analysis and designing of microbiomes have become a new paradigm in
microbiology.•Understanding and rational engineering of microbiomes require model-based …

In synthetic biology, engineering principles are applied to system design. The development
of synthetic microbial consortia represents the intersection of synthetic biology and …