Recent studies have brought forward the critical role of emergent properties in shaping
microbial communities and the ecosystems of which they are a part. Emergent properties …

Soil, the living terrestrial skin of the Earth, plays a central role in supporting life and is home
to an unimaginable diversity of microorganisms. This review explores key drivers for …

Remarkable technological advances have revealed ever more properties and behaviours of
individual microorganisms, but the novel data generated by these techniques have not yet …

Microbial activity in soil is spatially heterogeneous often forming spatial hotspots that
contribute disproportionally to biogeochemical processes. Evidence suggests that bacterial …

Assessing the ecological impacts of environmental change requires knowledge of the
relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The exact nature of this …

Ecologists urgently need a better ability to predict how environmental change affects
biodiversity. We examine individual-based ecology (IBE), a research paradigm that …

A key question in ecology and evolution is the relative role of natural selection and neutral
evolution in producing biogeographic patterns. We quantify the role of neutral processes by …

Biofilms are complex, self-organized consortia of microorganisms that produce a functional,
protective matrix of biomolecules. Physically, the structure of a biofilm can be described as …

The diploid, polymorphic yeast Candida albicans is one of the most important human
pathogenic fungi. C. albicans can grow, proliferate and coexist as a commensal on or within …

Soil is populated by highly diverse microbial communities mediating important processes
and functions. The distribution of microbes, however, is neither uniform nor random. Instead …