Top-down strategies for engineering microbial communities with antimicrobial properties
Frédéric Borges
Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France
Microbiome engineering is attracting considerable interest from various fields, including the environment, agriculture and health. This approach relies on the ecological properties of microbial communities to perform useful functions, such as inhibiting the growth of undesirable microorganisms. The aim of microbiome engineering is to improve the function of an ecosystem by manipulating the composition of microbes. In microbiome engineering, the terms 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' describe two opposing approaches to controlling or constructing microbial communities. In bottom-up microbiome engineering, a subset of microorganisms with desired functions is assembled into a synthetic community. In contrast, top-down microbiome engineering involves taking an existing, complex natural community and steering it towards a desired function by altering environmental or operating conditions such as pH, temperature, and nutrients. This conference will demonstrate how the top-down approach can be used to study and select communities that exhibit antimicrobial activity against undesirable microorganisms.