ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Microbial biospherics: The experimental study of ecosystem function and evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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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
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Operationalizing soil persistence in soil and ecosystem ecology.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Rapid evolution in necromass use under resource limitation reduces persistence in producer-decomposer microbial biospheres.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Microbial Evolution and Systematics: Archaea and Bacteria.Progress in molecular and subcellular biology · 2026Review
- The failure and revival of closed microbial ecosystems: evidence from the shifts in microbial and chemical diversities.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Niche formation and metabolic interactions contribute to stable diversity in a spatially structured cyanobacterial community.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Light-eye-body axis: exploring the network from retinal illumination to systemic regulation.Theranostics · 2025Review
- Closed ecosystems extract energy through self-organized nutrient cycles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Formation and emergent dynamics of spatially organized microbial systems.Interface focus · 2023Review
- Review
- Closed microbial communities self-organize to persistently cycle carbon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Microbial self-recycling and biospherics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Microbial population dynamics and evolutionary outcomes under extreme energy limitation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Synthetic Biology for Terraformation Lessons from Mars, Earth, and the Microbiome.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Awareness that our planet is a self-supporting biosphere with sunlight as its major source of energy for life has resulted in a long-term historical fascination with the workings of self-supporting ecological systems. However, the studies of such systems have never entered the canon of ecological or evolutionary tools and instead, have led a fringe existence connected to life support system engineering and space travel. We here introduce a framework for a renaissance in biospherics based on the study of matter-closed, energy-open ecosystems at a microbial level (microbial biospherics). Recent progress in genomics, robotics, and sensor technology makes the study of closed systems now much more tractable than in the past, and we argue that the time has come to emancipate the study of closed systems from this fringe context and bring them into a mainstream approach for studying ecosystem processes. By permitting highly replicated long-term studies, especially on predetermined and simplified systems, microbial biospheres offer the opportunity to test and develop strong hypotheses about ecosystem function and the ecological and evolutionary determinants of long-term system failure or persistence. Unlike many sciences, ecosystem ecology has never fully embraced a reductionist approach and has remained focused on the natural world in all its complexity. We argue that a reductionist approach to ecosystem ecology, using microbial biospheres, based on a combination of theory and the replicated study of much simpler self-enclosed microsystems could pay huge dividends.
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