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Targeting endangered ecosystems using synthetic microbiomes. Drylands (a,b) and coral reefs (c,d) are two well-known examples of ecosystems threatened by global warming and other Anthropogenic drivers. They both involve complex microbiomes (c,d) that is key to preserve their resilience and biodiversity and are also the target for potential engineering strategies. One way of modelling the potential impact of such strategy is the use of a resource-consumer network (e) where two sets R and C indicate available resources and those species exploiting them (links indicate such interactions and the radius of the circles would scale as population size). Figure (d) adapted from (Van Oppen and Blackall, 2019).
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The possibility of abrupt transitions threatens to poise ecosystems into irreversibly degraded states. Recently, it has been proposed the use of engineered microbiomes in endangered ecosystems to prevent them to cross tipping points and avoid collapse. Potential targets for such interventions include some of the most prominent life-support systems...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... potential examples for such an engineering approach are shown in Figure 1a-d. These involve drylands (a,b) and corals (c,d). ...
Context 2
... kind of interventions can be used? Within the context of coral reefs, they are known to be holobionts, including a microbial community (Figure 1c) involving a small number of taxa. The health of the corals is correlated with microbiome composition and treatments against undesirable pathogens or microbial diversity imbalances have been approached with probiotics following dysbiosis ( Peixoto et al., 2021) but engineered bacteria have also been pointed out as a promising alternative (van Oppen et al., 2015;Van Oppen and Blackall, 2019). ...
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