ArticlePloS one2014
Spatial ecology of bacteria at the microscale in soil.
Article in PloS one, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 134 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
134 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 405 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Matter of Metals: Copper but Not Cadmium Affects the Microbial Alpha-Diversity of Soils and Sediments - a Meta-analysis.Microbial ecology · 2023Pooled it
- Does Irrigation with Treated and Untreated Wastewater Increase Antimicrobial Resistance in Soil and Water: A Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Pooled it
- Ecological responses of soil bacteria to rapid and slow temperature fluctuations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Ultrasensitive Visual Detection of Chitin Degradation via Surface Pitting on a NanofibrousLangmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids · 2026Article
- Restoring soil and sediment microbiomes in the Anthropocene.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Interplay of Spatial Structure and Interactions in Microbial Communities.Environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Bacterial necromass recycling promotes diversity maintenance in bacterial communities via resource partitioning.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Accessible, robust ultrahigh-throughput microbiome analysis via integration of uniform droplet-templated emulsification and FACS.PloS one · 2026Article
- Spatial and depth structuring predominate over temporal variation in Mediterranean climate grassland soil viral communities.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Strain-level dissection of complex rhizoplane and soil bacterial communities using single-cell genomics and metagenomics.DNA research : an international journal for rapid publication of reports on genes and genomes · 2025Article
- Exploring Bacterial Interactions Under the Stress Gradient Hypothesis in Response to Selenium Stress.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Breaking the paradigm-Applied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Evaluation of Bacterial Population Changes and Ecological Dynamics in Oil-Impacted Soils Using 16S rRNA Amplicon Sequencing.Biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Behind the scenes of cellular organization: Quantifying spatial phenotypes of puncta structures with statistical models including random fields.Molecular biology of the cell · 2025Article
- Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Review
- Comparing field and lab quantitative stable isotope probing for nitrogen assimilation in soil microbes.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Habitat fragmentation enhances microbial collective defence.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Encounter rates and engagement times limit the transmission of conjugative plasmids.PLoS genetics · 2025Article
74 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite an exceptional number of bacterial cells and species in soils, bacterial diversity seems to have little effect on soil processes, such as respiration or nitrification, that can be affected by interactions between bacterial cells. The aim of this study is to understand how bacterial cells are distributed in soil to better understand the scaling between cell-to-cell interactions and what can be measured in a few milligrams, or more, of soil. Based on the analysis of 744 images of observed bacterial distributions in soil thin sections taken at different depths, we found that the inter-cell distance was, on average 12.46 µm and that these inter-cell distances were shorter near the soil surface (10.38 µm) than at depth (>18 µm), due to changes in cell densities. These images were also used to develop a spatial statistical model, based on Log Gaussian Cox Processes, to analyse the 2D distribution of cells and construct realistic 3D bacterial distributions. Our analyses suggest that despite the very high number of cells and species in soil, bacteria only interact with a few other individuals. For example, at bacterial densities commonly found in bulk soil (10(8) cells g(-1) soil), the number of neighbours a single bacterium has within an interaction distance of ca. 20 µm is relatively limited (120 cells on average). Making conservative assumptions about the distribution of species, we show that such neighbourhoods contain less than 100 species. This value did not change appreciably as a function of the overall diversity in soil, suggesting that the diversity of soil bacterial communities may be species-saturated. All in all, this work provides precise data on bacterial distributions, a novel way to model them at the micrometer scale as well as some new insights on the degree of interactions between individual bacterial cells in soils.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.