Synthetic Microbial Consortia as Model Systems: Assembly, Interaction, and Emergent Function

Microbial communities drive essential processes across natural and engineered environments, yet the complexity of these systems often limits our ability to understand how individual species contribute to collective outcomes. To address this, researchers increasingly turn to synthetic and defined microbial consortia; rationally assembled communities of known composition, as tractable experimental systems. These simplified communities enable controlled investigation of interspecies interactions, metabolic exchange, and emergent community-level properties that are difficult to resolve in complex natural microbiomes. Recent advances in genome-scale metabolic modelling, high-throughput cultivation, and multi-omics technologies have accelerated progress in this field, enabling researchers to design, perturb, and predict the behaviour of microbial consortia with growing precision.This Research Topic aims to advance the systems-level understanding of how defined microbial consortia are assembled, maintained, and functionally controlled. We seek contributions that move beyond descriptive characterization to address mechanistic questions: How do metabolic cooperation and competition shape community composition? What determines the stability and resilience of synthetic consortia under perturbation? How can we predict collective function from the properties of individual community members? By integrating experimental and computational approaches, this collection will highlight how designed microbial systems serve as platforms for testing ecological theory, discovering novel microbial interactions, and developing biotechnological applications — from bioremediation and sustainable agriculture to human health and industrial bioprocessing.We welcome Original Research, Reviews, Methods, Mini Reviews, and Perspective articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:• Design, construction, and characterization of synthetic or defined microbial communities• Metabolic cross-feeding, division of labor, and cooperative or competitive dynamics within consortia• Community assembly rules, ecological stability, and response to environmental perturbation• Model-guided approaches to community design, including constraint-based and agent-based modeling• Experimental evolution of microbial consortia and adaptation of community-level traits• Integration of multi-omics data (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics, fluxomics) for systems-level characterization of consortia• Applications of defined consortia in environmental, industrial, agricultural, or biomedical contextsPlease note that Systems Microbiology does not consider descriptive studies that are solely based on amplicon (e.g., 16S rRNA, 18SrRNA, ITS and other marker genes) profiles, unless they are accompanied by a clear hypothesis and experimentation, and provide insight into the microbiological system or process being studied. Topic editors: Minmin Pan, Bibiana Coppotelli, Yongchao Wang Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81430/synthetic-microbial-consortia-as-model-systems-assembly-interaction-and-emergent-function