Soil is an immense habitat for diverse organisms across the tree of life, but just how many
organisms live in soil is surprisingly unknown. Previous efforts to enumerate soil biodiversity …

Microbial communities drive global biogeochemical cycles and shape the health of plants
and animals—including humans. Their structure and function are determined by ecological …

Although there is now an extensive understanding of the diversity of microbial life on earth
through culture-independent metagenomic DNA sequence analyses, the isolation and …

The immense diversity of soil bacterial communities has stymied efforts to characterize
individual taxa and document their global distributions. We analyzed soils from 237 …

A recent paper by Martiny argues that “high proportions” of bacteria in diverse Earth
environments have been cultured. Here we reanalyze a portion of the data in that paper, and …

Microplastics, as an emerging pollutant of global importance, have been well documented in
aquatic ecosystems. However, little is known about the effects of microplastics on …

The great majority of microbial species remains uncultured, severely limiting their taxonomic
characterization and thus communication among scientists. Although Candidatus was …

The subterranean world hosts up to one-fifth of all biomass, including microbial communities
that drive transformations central to Earth's biogeochemical cycles. However, little is known …

Genomes are critical units in microbiology, yet ascertaining quality in prokaryotic genome
assemblies remains a formidable challenge. We present GUNC (the Genome UNClutterer) …

Assignment of 16S rRNA gene sequences to operational taxonomic units (OTUs) is a
computational bottleneck in the process of analyzing microbial communities. Although this …