Microbiome Responses to Perturbations: Understanding, Prediction, and Engineering

Dear Colleagues, 

Harnessing microbial communities to the benefit of our society is considered the next frontier of science in various fields, including agriculture, environmenal science, biotechnology, and biomedical science, due to its huge impact on economy, the environment, and human health, when successful. Controlling or designing community-level properties through either targed interventions or the synthesis of functional consortia is a challenging goal, however, as biotic and abiotic perturbations to the system may lead to significant changes in community-level function, often in an unexpected way. Achieving this goal requires rational approaches that necessarily account for the dependencies of microbial growth, interactions, community function on environmental, genetic, and compositional factors. The utility and development of theoretical, computational, and experimental protocols/platforms and analytical tools in synthetic biology, computational biology, and microbial community ecology are criticially important in this regard. 

This special issue on "Microbiome Responses to Perturbations: Understanding, Prediction, and Engineering" invites experts in the related fields to contrbute original research articles, as well as reviews, to address current challenges and issues in further advancing our understanding to better predict the effect of perturbations on the dynamics and function of microbial communities towards system-level engineering. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Experimental studies on a microbial community’s response to perturbations
• Computational, modeling, or data integration methods for predicting microbial interactions and community dynamics
• Theoretical studies for revealing the design principles of microbial communities
• Data-driven modeling for discovering perturbation-specific molecular signatures in microbial communities
• Synthesis of functional consortia for controllable community function
• Rational approaches to microbiome engineering

Prof. Dr. Hyun-Seob Song
Prof. Dr. Hans Bernstein
Guest Editors

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