ReviewNature reviews. Microbiology2019
Common principles and best practices for engineering microbiomes.
Review in Nature reviews. Microbiology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 236 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
236 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Principles for Rigorous Design and Application of Synthetic Microbial Communities.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Pooled it
- Harnessing synthetic microbial communities for desert vegetation restoration.Synthetic and systems biotechnology · 2027Review
- Enhancing the Secretion Systems: Genetic Engineering of Super Bioagents for Effective Plant Disease Control.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Review
- Describing the persistence landscape for introducing microbes into complex communities.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Applications of synthetic biology in biomedicine.Molecular biomedicine · 2026Review
- SynComs should be rigorously defined, not renamed.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A self-iterative orthogonal base-editing platform enables multiplex N-to-N diversification and genome-scale functional screening in Escherichia coli.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Application of antibiotics for the selective isolation of previously uncultured species from activated sludge.Microbiology spectrum · 2026Article
- Metabolic Modelling Facilitates the Design of Synthetic Communities by Simplifying Natural Microbial Communities.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Review
- Quartet: Disentangling positive and negative components of microbial interactions.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Epistatic interactions inform rational design of synthetic microbial communities for bioremediation.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- A novelApplied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- DecodingPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- From "synthetic" to defined microbial communities for clearer terminology.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Review
- Development of a plant growth-promoting bacterial EcoBiome derived from desert soil isolates.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Advances and future directions in identifying specific taxa from microbial meta-omics data: from pipeline to deep learning.mSystems · 2026Review
- Rhizosphere Microbiome Engineering for Climate-Smart Agriculture: From Synthetic Consortia to Precision Decision Support.Microorganisms · 2026Review
- Automated linear DNA assembly of A. thaliana's chloroplast and mitochondrial genome.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
176 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Despite broad scientific interest in harnessing the power of Earth's microbiomes, knowledge gaps hinder their efficient use for addressing urgent societal and environmental challenges. We argue that structuring research and technology developments around a design-build-test-learn (DBTL) cycle will advance microbiome engineering and spur new discoveries of the basic scientific principles governing microbiome function. In this Review, we present key elements of an iterative DBTL cycle for microbiome engineering, focusing on generalizable approaches, including top-down and bottom-up design processes, synthetic and self-assembled construction methods, and emerging tools to analyse microbiome function. These approaches can be used to harness microbiomes for broad applications related to medicine, agriculture, energy and the environment. We also discuss key challenges and opportunities of each approach and synthesize them into best practice guidelines for engineering microbiomes. We anticipate that adoption of a DBTL framework will rapidly advance microbiome-based biotechnologies aimed at improving human and animal health, agriculture and enabling the bioeconomy.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.