microbial communities
Research Article | Ecological and Evolutionary ScienceStrain-Level Diversity Impacts Cheese Rind Microbiome Assembly and FunctionOur work demonstrated that the specific microbial strains used to construct a microbiome could impact the species composition, perturbation responses, and functional outputs of that system. These findings suggest that 16S rRNA gene taxonomic profiles alone may have limited potential to predict the dynamics of microbial communities because they usually do not capture strain-level diversity. Observations from our synthetic communities...
Opinion/Hypothesis | Ecological and Evolutionary ScienceEmergence of Metabolite Provisioning as a By-Product of Evolved Biological FunctionsMicrobes commonly use metabolites produced by other organisms to compete effectively with others in their environment. As a result, microbial communities are composed of networks of metabolically interdependent organisms. How these networks evolve and shape population diversity, stability, and community function is a subject of active research. But how did these metabolic interactions develop initially? In particular, how and why are...
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceExoenzymes as a Signature of Microbial Response to Marine Environmental ConditionsMicrobes release exoenzymes into the environment to break down complex organic matter and nutrients into simpler forms that can be assimilated and utilized, thereby addressing their cellular carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus requirements. Despite its importance, the factors associated with the synthesis of exoenzymes are not clearly defined, especially for the marine environment. Here, we found that exoenzymes associated with nitrogen...
Research Article | Molecular Biology and PhysiologyRegulatory Noncoding Small RNAs Are Diverse and Abundant in an Extremophilic Microbial CommunityMicroorganisms in the natural world are found in communities, communicating and interacting with each other; therefore, it is essential that microbial regulatory mechanisms, such as gene regulation affected by small RNAs (sRNAs), be investigated at the community level. This work demonstrates that metatranscriptomic field experiments can link environmental variation with changes in RNA pools and have the potential to provide new insights...
Editor's Pick Research Article | Ecological and Evolutionary ScienceRegime Shifts in a Phage-Bacterium Ecosystem and Strategies for Its ControlPhage-microbe communities play an important role in human health as well as natural and industrial environments. Here we show that these communities can assume several alternative species compositions separated by abrupt regime shifts. Our model predicts these regime shifts in the competition between bacterial strains protected by two different phage defense mechanisms: abortive infection/CRISPR and partial resistance. The history...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesTheoretical and Simulation-Based Investigation of the Relationship between Sequencing Effort, Microbial Community Richness, and Diversity in Binning Metagenome-Assembled GenomesShort-read sequencing with Illumina sequencing technology provides an accurate, high-throughput method for characterizing the metabolic potential of microbial communities. Short-read sequences can be assembled and binned into metagenome-assembled genomes, thus shedding light on the function of microbial ecosystems that are important for health, agriculture, and Earth system processes. The work presented here provides an analytical...
Perspective | Ecological and Evolutionary ScienceExperimental Microbiomes: Models Not to ScaleLow-cost, high-throughput nucleic acid sequencing ushered the field of microbial ecology into a new era in which the microbial composition of nearly every conceivable environment on the planet is under examination. However, static “screenshots” derived from sequence-only approaches belie the underlying complexity of the microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions occurring within these systems.
Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceFunctional Gene Array-Based Ultrasensitive and Quantitative Detection of Microbial Populations in Complex CommunitiesThe rapid development of metagenomic technologies, including microarrays, over the past decade has greatly expanded our understanding of complex microbial systems. However, because of the ever-expanding number of novel microbial sequences discovered each year, developing a microarray that is representative of real microbial communities, is specific and sensitive, and provides quantitative information remains a challenge. The newly...
Editor's Pick Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesDesigning Metabolic Division of Labor in Microbial CommunitiesUnderstanding how microbes assemble into communities is a fundamental open issue in biology, relevant to human health, metabolic engineering, and environmental sustainability. A possible mechanism for interactions of microbes is through cross-feeding, i.e., the exchange of small molecules. These metabolic exchanges may allow different microbes to specialize in distinct tasks and evolve division of labor. To systematically explore the...
Perspective | Ecological and Evolutionary ScienceBridging the Holistic-Reductionist Divide in Microbial EcologyMicrobial communities are inherently complex systems. To address this complexity, microbial ecologists are developing new, more elaborate laboratory models at an ever-increasing pace.