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.

微生物组工程越来越多地被用作应对健康、农业和气候挑战的解决方案。通常，操作涉及接种新微生物，旨在改善现有微生物群落的功能。尽管如此，微生物组工程接种剂方面的努力常常未能建立和/或对生态系统功能产生持久的改变。我们认为造成这些缺陷的根本原因之一是没有考虑到有机体建立的障碍。这是宏观生态学研究的一个关键挑战和焦点，特别是入侵生物学和恢复生态学。我们采用入侵生物学的框架，将建立障碍总结为三类：（1）繁殖体压力，（2）环境过滤，（3）生物相互作用因素。我们认为生物相互作用是微生物组工程研究中最被忽视的因素，我们建议采取一些行动来加速工程解决方案。