Gemechu Berhanu¹, Vikram Godishala², Venkataramana Kandi^3,

The microbiome is a multifarious and dynamic ecological element, in which different species such as bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa, and viruses are in continual flux. They can alter host development, the physiology, and systemic defenses that play a great role in food producing animals. Perturbation to the microbiota or dysbiosis affects greatly the host’s normal physiology and may cause different diseases in the host. Microbiomes can be studied in different ways including different molecular techniques and omics technologies. Microbiome engineering is an experimental method that improves host performance by artificially selecting for microbial communities with specific effects on host fitness. Different methods are used in microbiome engineering and these include synthetic biology, modulating the microbiota, antibiotics, feed enzymes, prebiotics, probiotics, fecal microbiota transplantation, horizontal gene transfer, acceptance, and maintenance of foreign DNA, and genome editing. All these methods participate in the manipulation of the genomic content of microbiomes. This technique has different advantages including treatment mental health problems, modulating host immunity, improving nutrition, modifying physiology of the hosts and the characteristics of the ecosystems where they reside, modulates the pathogenesis, progression, and treatment of diseases, improving agricultural productivity, controls the variability for the efficiency of feed utilization in ruminants. Therefore, engineering microbiomes has a great advantage in improving the production systems of livestock.

Microbiome, ecology, engineering, improvements, livestock, production