Cultivating Healthy Connections: Exploring and Engineering the Microbial Flow That Shapes Microbiomes

Our view of the microbial world has undergone a radical transformation over the past decade. For most of the 20th century, medical microbiological research was focused on understanding the virulent nature of disease-causing pathogens. More recently, advances in DNA sequencing methodologies have exposed a wider diversity of microscopic wildlife that associate with our bodies and the environments around us, and the unexpected roles they play in supporting our health. Our expanding view of the microbial world is now motivating therapeutic interventions that are based not just on the elimination of nefarious pathogens but the nurturing of beneficial microbiomes. In this Commentary, I consider how our historically pathogen-based view of host-microbe interactions may be limiting the scope of new and alternative strategies for engineering microbiomes. I suggest that recognizing the therapeutic potential of the ongoing microbial transmission that connects microbiomes could illuminate unexplored opportunities for cultivating healthy host-microbe relationships.