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 …

Recent advances in robotics and affordable genomic sequencing technologies have made it
possible to establish and quantitatively track the assembly of enrichment communities in …

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 …

May's stability theory, which holds that large ecosystems can be stable up to a critical level of
complexity, a product of the number of resident species and the intensity of their interactions …

Environmental composition is a major, though poorly understood, determinant of
microbiome dynamics. Here we ask whether general principles govern how microbial …

Approximately half of the global annual production of wastewater is released untreated into
aquatic environments, which results in worldwide organic matter pollution in urban rivers …

The performance of full-scale biological wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) depends on
the operational and environmental conditions of treatment systems. However, we do not …

Ecological relationships between bacteria mediate the services that gut microbiomes
provide to their hosts. Knowing the overall direction and strength of these relationships is …

Although interplays between plant and coevolved microorganisms are believed to drive
landscape formation and ecosystem services, the relationships between the mycobiome and …

Microbial interactions are expected to modulate microbial diversity, but whether they inhibit
or stimulate further diversity in complex microbial communities, and how, remains poorly …