ArticleNature reviews. Microbiology2015
Dispersing misconceptions and identifying opportunities for the use of 'omics' in soil microbial ecology.
Article in Nature reviews. Microbiology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 93 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
93 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Unboxing the black box-one step forward to understand the soil microbiome: A systematic review.Microbial ecology · 2023Pooled it
- Soil and leaf litter metaproteomics-a brief guideline from sampling to understanding.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2016Guideline
- Characterization of Soil Microbial Communities Associated with the Sustainability of Acacia Species in the Imam Turki Bin Abdullah Royal Reserve, Saudi Arabia.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Plant-Microbe Alliance for Environmental Restoration: From Nature-Inspired Solutions to Engineered Ecological Recovery.Microbial biotechnology · 2026Article
- Comparative metagenomic and metabolomic characterization of conventionally and nitrogen-only fertilized maize soils and a forest-derived fermentation-enriched microbial community.World journal of microbiology & biotechnology · 2026Article
- Responses of Soil Microbial Community to Rocky Desertification Succession and Their Relationships With Plant Functional Diversity in Southwest China Karst Ecosystem.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Plant-soil-microbiome interactions: mechanisms, advances, and challenges in sustainable agriculture and healthy agroecosystems.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Next-generation soil monitoring: linking metagenomics, biosensors, and ecological modeling for sustainable agriculture.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- A Practical Framework for Environmental Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring in Freshwater Ecosystems.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Long-term elevated precipitation promotes an acid metabolic preference in soil microbial communities in a Tibetan alpine grassland.mSystems · 2025Article
- Microbial adaptations to acidic, nutrient- and metal-rich lakes in Aotearoa New Zealand.Extremophiles : life under extreme conditions · 2025Article
- Assessment of Soil Health Through Metagenomic Analysis of Bacterial Diversity in Russian Black Soil.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Transdisciplinary Collaborations for Advancing Sustainable and Resilient Agricultural Systems.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Droplet microfluidics for single-cell studies: a frontier in ecological understanding of microbiomes.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2025Review
- Phyllosphere of senescent crops as a microbial NFrontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Soil properties drive nitrous oxide accumulation patterns by shaping denitrifying bacteriomes.Environmental microbiome · 2024Article
- SPLANG-a synthetic poisson-lognormal-based abundance and network generative model for microbial interaction inference algorithms.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The piranha gut microbiome provides a selective lens into river water biodiversity.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Comparative analysis of prokaryotic microbiomes in high-altitude active layer soils: insights from Ladakh and global analogues using In-Silico approaches.Brazilian journal of microbiology : [publication of the Brazilian Society for Microbiology] · 2024Article
- Association between bacterial community and cadmium distribution across Colombian cacao crops.Microbiology spectrum · 2024Article
33 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
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Technological advances are enabling the sequencing of environmental DNA and RNA at increasing depth and with decreasing costs. Metagenomic and transcriptomic analysis of soil microbial communities and the assembly of 'population genomes' from soil DNA are therefore now feasible. Although the value of such 'omic' approaches is limited by the associated technical and bioinformatic difficulties, even if these obstacles were eliminated and 'perfect' metagenomes and metatranscriptomes were available, important conceptual challenges remain. This Opinion article considers these conceptual challenges in the context of the current use of omics in soil microbiology, but the main arguments presented are also relevant to the application of omics to marine, freshwater, gut or other environments.
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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.