Microbial communities often exhibit incredible taxonomic diversity, raising questions
regarding the mechanisms enabling species coexistence and the role of this diversity in …

Bacteria frequently engage in obligate metabolic mutualisms with other microorganisms.
However, it remains generally unclear how the resulting metabolic dependencies affect the …

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

Microbial communities populate most environments on earth and play a critical role in
ecology and human health. Their composition is thought to be largely shaped by …

Metabolic specialization is a general biological principle that shapes the assembly of
microbial communities. Individual cell types rarely metabolize a wide range of substrates …

Metabolic exchange mediates interactions among microbes, helping explain diversity in
microbial communities. As these interactions often involve a fitness cost, it is unclear how …

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 …

For microbiome biology to become a more predictive science, we must identify which
descriptive features of microbial communities are reproducible and predictable, which are …

The microbial world displays an immense taxonomic diversity. This diversity is manifested
also in a multitude of metabolic pathways that can utilise different substrates and produce …

Understanding the processes that are driving variation of natural microbial communities
across space or time is a major challenge for ecologists. Environmental conditions strongly …