Maull, VictorSolé Vicente, Ricard, 1962-2024-09-192024-09-192024Maull V, Solé R. Biodiversity as a firewall to engineered microbiomes for restoration and conservation. R Soc Open Sci. 2024 Jun 26;11(6):231526. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.2315262054-5703http://hdl.handle.net/10230/61176The possibility of abrupt transitions threatens to poise ecosystems into irreversibly degraded states. Synthetic biology has recently been proposed to prevent them from crossing tipping points. However, there is little understanding of the impact of such intervention on the resident communities. Can such modification have 'unintended consequences', such as loss of species? Here, we address this problem by using a mathematical model that allows us to simulate this intervention scenario explicitly. We show how the indirect effect of damping the decay of shared resources results in biodiversity increase, and last but not least, the successful incorporation of the synthetic within the ecological network and very small-positive changes in the population size of the resident community. Furthermore, extensions and implications for future restoration and terraformation strategies are discussed.application/pdfengCopyright © 2024, The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231526BioengineeringEcological networksInvasion dynamicsSynthetic biologyinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess