Stilianos Louca Daniel E. Winkler Kelli L. Feeser Sarah-Jane Haig Katrine L. Whiteson Joanne B. Emerson John M. Dunbar Michaeline B.N. Albright 2022 <div id="Abs1-section" class="c-article-section"><div id="Abs1-content" class="c-article-section__content"><p>Microbiome engineering is increasingly being employed as a solution to challenges in health, agriculture, and climate. Often manipulation involves inoculation of new microbes designed to improve function into a preexisting microbial community. Despite, increased efforts in microbiome engineering inoculants frequently fail to establish and/or confer long-lasting modifications on ecosystem function. We posit that one underlying cause of these shortfalls is the failure to consider barriers to organism establishment. This is a key challenge and focus of macroecology research, specifically invasion biology and restoration ecology. We adopt a framework from invasion biology that summarizes establishment barriers in three categories: (1) propagule pressure, (2) environmental filtering, and (3) biotic interactions factors. We suggest that biotic interactions is the most neglected factor in microbiome engineering research, and we recommend a number of actions to accelerate engineering solutions.</p></div></div> application/pdf 10.1038/s41396-021-01088-5 en Nature Solutions in microbiome engineering: Prioritizing barriers to organism establishment article