Dear Editor,rnSoil microbial biodiversity loss caused by agricultural intensification,climate change,and the application of che-mical fertilizer has become a serious problem that threatens humans(Wall et al.,2015).One phenomenon responsible for economic and food security issues is soil-borne diseases (Fisher et al.,2012),which were reported to be associated with microbial diversity loss(Shen et al.,2013;Fu et al.,2017).Suppressive soils provide an ideal model for study-ing the opposing effect of the microbial community against soil-borne pathogen invasion(Schlatter et al.,2017).Our previous work has demonstrated that a suppressive soil shows higher microbial richness than a conducive soil(Shen et al.,2015).Hence,a better understanding of whether microbial diversity is truly a mechanism contributing to the inhibi-tion of pathogen establishment in suppressive soils could contribute to pathogen management.In addition,mixed populations can perform complex functions and are robust to changes in the environment,and synthetic communities retain key features of natural ones(Groβkopf and Soyer,2014),giving us an opportunity to manipulate microbiome assembly at the initial stages.Thus,beyond extremely high diversity,the identification of species or groups of microbes that are responsible for suppression will help to obtain a more comprehensive picture.