Solutions in microbiome engineering: prioritizing barriers to organism establishment.

ABSTRACT: Microbiome engineering is increasingly being employed as a solution to challenges in health, agriculture, and climate. Often manipulation involves inoculation of new microbes designed to improve function into a preexisting microbial community. Despite, increased efforts in microbiome engineering inoculants frequently fail to establish and/or confer long-lasting modifications on ecosystem function. We posit that one underlying cause of these shortfalls is the failure to consider barriers to organism establishment. This is a key challenge and focus of macroecology research, specifically invasion biology and restoration ecology. We adopt a framework from invasion biology that summarizes establishment barriers in three categories: (1) propagule pressure, (2) environmental filtering, and (3) bi

SUBMITTER: Albright MBN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8776856 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature