Dear Colleagues, 

Harnessing microbial communities to the benefit of our society is considered the next frontier of science in various fields, including agriculture, environmenal science, biotechnology, and biomedical science, due to its huge impact on economy, the environment, and human health, when successful. Controlling or designing community-level properties through either targed interventions or the synthesis of functional consortia is a challenging goal, however, as biotic and abiotic perturbations to the system may lead to significant changes in community-level function, often in an unexpected way. Achieving this goal requires rational approaches that necessarily account for the dependencies of microbial growth, interactions, community function on environmental, genetic, and compositional factors. The utility and development of theoretical, computational, and experimental protocols/platforms and analytical tools in synthetic biology, computational biology, and microbial community ecology are criticially important in this regard. 

This special issue on "Microbiome Responses to Perturbations: Understanding, Prediction, and Engineering" invites experts in the related fields to contrbute original research articles, as well as reviews, to address current challenges and issues in further advancing our understanding to better predict the effect of perturbations on the dynamics and function of microbial communities towards system-level engineering. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Experimental studies on a microbial community’s response to perturbations
• Computational, modeling, or data integration methods for predicting microbial interactions and community dynamics
• Theoretical studies for revealing the design principles of microbial communities
• Data-driven modeling for discovering perturbation-specific molecular signatures in microbial communities
• Synthesis of functional consortia for controllable community function
• Rational approaches to microbiome engineering

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Processes is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• microbial communities
• modeling
• synthetic consortia
• microbial community ecology
• computational biology