Given a list of candidate species, which community should one form to optimize a target function? Answering this fundamental ecological question is particularly urgent in the emerging field of synthetic microbial ecology, where it would dramatically improve our ability to design multi-species consortia for biotechnological applications.  In this talk, I will discuss new methodologies that my group is introducing for that purpose which leverage existing parallels with the field of genetics, in particular global epistasis.  Our work seeks to place the goals of engineering biological function across scales, from the molecular to the organismal to the ecological, under a common theoretical and methodological framework that can lead to the flow of ideas and methodologies across them.

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