Examples include the introduced bacteria fail to enhance the degradation within the soil, and the bioaugmentation trials fail on the laboratory scale, but succeed on the large scale. Many of these problems occurred because the microbial ecology issues were not taken into consideration in order to map the performance of the bioaugmentation. It is crucial to consider the microbes' ability to withstand the conditions in the microbial community to be placed in. In many of the cases that have failed, only the microbes' ability to break down compounds was considered and less their fitness in existing communities and the resulting competitive stress. It is better to identify the existing communities before looking at the strains needed to break down pollutants. See also biotransformation Syntrophomonas zehnderi Dehalococcoidetes References Microbiology Bioremediation