Construction and application of gut synthetic microbial communities

  • QIAO Ting ,
  • SONG Xin ,
  • XIONG Zhiqiang ,
  • AI Lianzhong ,
  • WANG Guangqiang
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  • 1(School of Health Science and Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 200093, China)
    2(School of Agriculture and Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China)

Received date: 2025-11-25

  Revised date: 2026-01-09

  Online published: 2026-09-10

Abstract

Gut microbiota of humans and animals plays a pivotal role in host nutritional metabolism, immune homeostasis, and disease resistance.However, natural microbiota exhibits inherent limitations such as substantial individual variability and functional redundancy, while traditional probiotics or fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) technologies face bottlenecks in safety and controllability.As artificially assembled communities with well-defined characteristics and controllable functions, synthetic microbial communities (SynComs) are constructed via “top-down” or “bottom-up” strategies, enabling the retention of core functions of natural microbiota while reducing research complexity.This work systematically summarizes their construction principles, core technologies, and evaluation criteria, reviews recent advances in their applications across fields including basic research in mouse models, dissection of human disease mechanisms, and development of live biological products (LBPs), analyzes current challenges such as standardization and colonization efficiency, and outlines future directions including personalized design and multi-kingdom community construction.These insights aim to provide a reference for the interdisciplinary research and translational application of SynComs.

Cite this article

QIAO Ting , SONG Xin , XIONG Zhiqiang , AI Lianzhong , WANG Guangqiang . Construction and application of gut synthetic microbial communities[J]. Food and Fermentation Industries, 2026 , 52(16) : 8 -16 . DOI: 10.13995/j.cnki.11-1802/ts.045284

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