Figure 1.
Applications of the synthetic microbiome in poultry production
Top-down and bottom-up approaches are currently proposed to design a synthetic microbiome. In the top-down design, a functional microbial community is first determined, and then the microbiome is optimized or minimized based on the structural and functional stability to achieve better performance. The bottom-up design starts from characterizing the function and metabolic pathways of individual microorganisms and then combines complementary functions or reconstructs metabolic networks in a synthetic community to generate a desired output.4 In both approaches, microbial metabolite cross-feeding and metabolic flux reconstruction should be considered. Individual microorganisms in a synthetic microbiome can be genetically engineered strains with metabolic flux modification or directly obtained from a naturally selected microbiome through culturomic method. A well-designed synthetic microbiome can be used in the preparation of poultry feed, the animal raising process, and the disposal of poultry production waste.