Table 2.

Key strategies that increase the success of top‐down microbiome engineering.

Approach	Proposed way	Proposed strategy	References
Enrichment	Experiment	Optimize environmental variables	[96, 97, 98, 99]
	Experiment and model	Enrich microbiomes with multireplicates	[98, 100]
	Experiment and model	Nonspecific cross‐feeding supports species diversity	[98]
	Experiment	Control the size of the bottleneck	[101, 102]
Artificial selection	Model	Promote species coexistence	[103]
	Model	Suppress noncontributors	[103]
	Model	Choose additional communities besides the highest functioning ones to reproduce	[103]
	Model	Reduce stochastic fluctuations in the biomass of each member in “Newborn” communities	[103]
	Experiment	Control the incubation times between transfers: transfers need to be done at the peak of the selected phenotypic activity	[104]
	Model	Control the interactions that encourage species coexistence	[105]
	Experiment	“Breeding” several “Adult” communities to construct the “Newborns”	[106]
Directed evolution	Model	Methods to impose perturbations: bottleneck, species knock‐in, species knockout, migration from the pool, coalescence, and altering resource concentration	[107]