Despite numerous surveys of gene and species content in heterotrophic microbial
communities, such as those found in animal guts, oceans, or soils, it is still unclear whether …

Quantitatively linking the composition and function of microbial communities is a major
aspiration of microbial ecology. Microbial community functions emerge from a complex web …

Heterotrophic bacteria—bacteria that utilize organic carbon sources—are taxonomically and
functionally diverse across environments. It is challenging to map metabolic interactions and …

Resource allocation affects the structure of microbiomes, including those associated with
living hosts. Understanding the degree to which this dependency determines interspecies …

Understanding the mechanisms that maintain microbial biodiversity is a critical aspiration in
ecology. Past work on microbial coexistence has largely focused on species pairs, but it is …

Microbial communities frequently invade one another as a whole, a phenomenon known as
community coalescence. Despite its potential importance for the assembly, dynamics, and …

Microbial systems appear to exhibit a relatively high switching capacity of moving back and
forth among few dominant communities (taxon memberships). While this switching behavior …

Directed evolution has been used for decades to engineer biological systems at or below
the organismal level. Above the organismal level, a small number of studies have attempted …

Directed evolution is a form of artificial selection that has been used for decades to find
biomolecules and organisms with new or enhanced functional traits. Directed evolution can …

Plant roots are functionally heterogeneous in cellular architecture, transcriptome profile,
metabolic state, and microbial immunity. We hypothesized that axial differentiation may also …