Managing microbial interactions in environmental biotechnology: can we scale interaction principles?
Publisher DOI
PubMed ID
42055860
Abstract
Microbial interactions hold vast potential for improving sustainability, including waste upcycling, greenhouse gas mitigation, contaminant bioremediation, and host performance. However, attempts to manage interactions in complex, open microbial communities often fall short of expectations, in part because interactions are highly context-dependent, with net effects arising from multiple component interactions, higher-order interactions, and rapid evolution-features largely revealed from studies with simplified communities. Here, we propose how these insights can be translated to complex communities by prioritizing the scales and disturbances that matter, leveraging the ecological context that constrains interactions, targeting function-critical behaviors and traits, and accounting for eco-evolutionary feedbacks. We further propose coupling top-down, trait-based, and coarse-grained approaches with bottom-up synthetic ecology approaches to diagnose failures and design robust microbial processes.
Date Issued
2026
Publication Type
Article
Subject(s)
Subjects
eco-evolutionary feedbacks
•
ecophysiology
•
higher-order interactions
•
microbial interactions
•
sustainability
•
synthetic communities
Language(s)
en
Additional Credits
Journal
Trends in Microbiology
Publisher
Cell Press
ISSN
1878-4380
0966-842X
Access(Rights)
open.access