Designer microbial consortia are an emerging frontier in synthetic biology that enable versatile microbiome engineering. However, the utilization of such consortia is hindered by our limited capacity in rapidly creating ecosystems with desired dynamics. Here we present the development of synthetic communities through social interaction engineering that combines modular pathway reconfiguration with model creation. Specifically, we created six two-strain consortia, each possessing a unique mode of interaction, including commensalism, amensalism, neutralism, cooperation, competition and predation. These consortia follow distinct population dynamics with characteristics determined by the underlying interaction modes. We showed that models derived from two-strain consortia can be used to design three- and four-strain ecosystems with predictable behaviors and further extended to provide insights into community dynamics in space. This work sheds light on the organization of interacting microbial species and provides a systematic framework—social interaction programming—to guide the development of synthetic ecosystems for diverse purposes.

微生物设计者财团是合成生物学中一个新兴的领域，可实现多功能微生物组工程。但是，由于我们在快速创建具有所需动态的生态系统方面的能力有限，阻碍了此类财团的利用。在这里，我们介绍了通过社交互动工程（将模块化途径重构与模型创建相结合）进行的综合社区的发展。具体来说，我们创建了六个由两个人组成的财团，每个财团都具有独特的互动模式，包括赞美主义，夸张主义，中立主义，合作，竞争和掠夺。这些财团遵循不同的种群动态，其特征由潜在的相互作用模式决定。我们表明，源自两株种群的模型可用于设计行为可预测的三株和四株生态系统，并进一步扩展以提供对空间中社区动态的见解。这项工作阐明了相互作用的微生物物种的组织，并提供了一个系统的框架-社会相互作用的程序设计-来指导合成生态系统为各种目的的发展。