ReviewThe ISME journal2016
Challenges in microbial ecology: building predictive understanding of community function and dynamics.
Review in The ISME journal, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 323 papers, 1 of them a synthesis 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
323 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Gut microbiome alterations during gastric cancer: evidence assessment of case-control studies.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Pooled it
- Short-term aerobic pretreatment of swine manure enhances short-chain fatty acid production in anaerobic fermentation: performance and mechanisms.Bioprocess and biosystems engineering · 2026Article
- Beyond the Rumen: Current Evidence and Knowledge Gaps in Microbial Diversity and Function Across the Bovine Gastrointestinal Tract.Current microbiology · 2026Review
- Growth capacity and mortality burden shape microbial persistence under osmotic stress inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Foundation Models for Microbiome Research: From Sequence Semantics to Community Dynamics and Multimodal World Models.Advanced genetics (Hoboken, N.J.) · 2026Review
- Environmental factors associated with nesting habits and age shape the composition and connection between skin and uropygial gland microbiomes of birds.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Metabolic Modelling Facilitates the Design of Synthetic Communities by Simplifying Natural Microbial Communities.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Salinity-driven nonlinear responses of microbial functional genes in sediment biogeochemical cycling across a salt lake gradient.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Soil Acidification Reshapes Microbial Trophic Interactions, with Implications for Plant Responses and Ecosystem Functioning in Tea Plantation Systems.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- AI-empowered human microbiome research.Gut · 2026Review
- Interspecies interactions drive bacterial proteome reorganization and emergent metabolism.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Advances and future directions in identifying specific taxa from microbial meta-omics data: from pipeline to deep learning.mSystems · 2026Review
- Article
- Ecological and genomic dynamics of the soil microbiome under sustained pressure from Phytophthora nicotianae, the causal agent of tobacco black shank disease.BMC microbiology · 2026Article
- Dynamical Systems-Constrained Metabolic Modeling Enables Forecasting of Host-Microbiome Dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Tracking Inter- and Intraspecific Bacterial Competition in Pairwise Assays Using a Transient Fluorescent Dye.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Article
- Slow spatial migration can help eradicate cooperative antimicrobial resistance in time-varying environments.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- River Microbiomes as Sentinels of National-Scale Freshwater Ecosystems.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Microbial biotechnology meets ecological theory: a unified framework to design industrial microbial consortia.International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology · 2026Review
263 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
31 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The importance of microbial communities (MCs) cannot be overstated. MCs underpin the biogeochemical cycles of the earth's soil, oceans and the atmosphere, and perform ecosystem functions that impact plants, animals and humans. Yet our ability to predict and manage the function of these highly complex, dynamically changing communities is limited. Building predictive models that link MC composition to function is a key emerging challenge in microbial ecology. Here, we argue that addressing this challenge requires close coordination of experimental data collection and method development with mathematical model building. We discuss specific examples where model-experiment integration has already resulted in important insights into MC function and structure. We also highlight key research questions that still demand better integration of experiments and models. We argue that such integration is needed to achieve significant progress in our understanding of MC dynamics and function, and we make specific practical suggestions as to how this could be achieved.
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Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.