From diet to function: using synthetic microbial communities to map gut microbial interactions

Diet shapes gut microbial ecology and function, but causal mechanisms are hard to resolve in native communities. Synthetic microbial communities provide defined systems to test how dietary substrates alter community structure, metabolism, and host responses. This review summarises SynCom design, experimental platforms, and dietary applications, highlights multi-omics and modelling approaches, proposes reporting standards, and considers challenges and future directions, including multi-kingdom and AI-enabled function-first SynComs.