Microbial consortia exhibit complex functional properties in contexts ranging from soils to
bioreactors to human hosts. Understanding how community composition determines …

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

Understanding the link between community composition and function is a major challenge in
microbial population biology, with implications for the management of natural microbiomes …

Microbial communities often perform important functions that depend on inter-species
interactions. To improve community function via artificial selection, one can repeatedly grow …

Microbes are predominantly found in surface-attached and spatially structured polymicrobial
communities. Within these communities, microbial cells excrete a wide range of metabolites …

To develop a quantitative theory that can predict how microbiomes assemble, and how they
respond to perturbations, we must identify which descriptive features of microbial …

Microbiome engineering offers the potential to leverage microbial communities to improve
outcomes in human health, agriculture, and climate. To translate this potential into reality, it …

Microbial communities exhibit exquisitely complex structure. Many aspects of this
complexity, from the number of species to the total number of interactions, are currently very …

Microbial communities are typically large, diverse, and complex, and identifying and
understanding the processes driving their structure has implications ranging from ecosystem …

Revealing the ecological principles that shape communities is a major challenge of the post-
genomic era. To date, a systematic approach for describing inter-species interactions has …