Designing and constructing synthetic microbial communities can be achieved in mainly two ways. One can either re-engineer naturally occurring microbial consortia, or one can de novo design and construct artificial microbial communities by rational assembly of synthetic parts and organisms. While de novo design has been successfully demonstrated for single model organisms, mainly E. coli and yeast, the construction of larger multi-species communities is currently limited to newly assembling naturally existing non-model organisms. Industrially and ecologically relevant microbial consortia consist of non-model species, which cannot or simply have not yet been genetically manipulated. Moreover, applications for genetically modified organisms for food industry, agriculture, and industry-scale fermentation are difficult, costly, or even prohibited. However, new tools are arising, for example DART, which allows strain-specific and site-specific genome editing via CRISPR-Cas within a microbial community without the need for prior culturing or engineering .