ArticlePLoS biology2019
High-order interactions distort the functional landscape of microbial consortia.
Article in PLoS biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 102 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
102 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Coexistence Theory for Microbial Ecology, and Vice Versa.Environmental microbiology · 2025Pooled it
- From Microbial Dynamics to Functionality in the Rhizosphere: A Systematic Review of the Opportunities With Synthetic Microbial Communities.Frontiers in plant science · 2021Pooled it
- Describing the persistence landscape for introducing microbes into complex communities.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Higher-order trade-offs in hypergraph community detection.Science advances · 2026Article
- Polychip-A High-Throughput Droplet Microfluidics Platform for Interrogating Microbial Interactions.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- SubCom analysis: dissecting microbial community functions into taxon-specific contributions and interaction contexts.Microbiome · 2026Article
- Diverse Microbial Communities Assemble on Both Recalcitrant and Labile Carbon Sources.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Epistatic interactions inform rational design of synthetic microbial communities for bioremediation.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Linking stochastic assembly to functional potential, redundancy, and trait patterns in bacterial communities.Microbiome · 2026Article
- Article
- Global epistasis in ecosystems arises from resource constraints.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Density-dependent feedback and higher-order interactions enable coexistence in phage-bacteria community dynamics.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Competition between resident rhizosphere bacteria enhances phytopathogen suppression via emergent antagonism.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Bacterial consortium construction for inhibition ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Supplementary probiotic complexity modulates growth performance, physiological status, and water quality of super-intensive Pacific white shrimp (Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Transitive interactions among rhizobia determine their symbiotic fitness.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Breeding of microbiomes conferring salt tolerance to plants.Microbiome · 2025Article
- Higher-order and distributed synergistic functional interactions encode information gain in goal-directed learning.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Leveraging multivariate information for community detection in functional brain networks.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Application of a Synthetic Microbial Community to Enhance Pepper Resistance AgainstPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
42 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
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Understanding the link between community composition and function is a major challenge in microbial population biology, with implications for the management of natural microbiomes and the design of synthetic consortia. Specifically, it is poorly understood whether community functions can be quantitatively predicted from traits of species in monoculture. Inspired by the study of complex genetic interactions, we have examined how the amylolytic rate of combinatorial assemblages of six starch-degrading soil bacteria depend on the separate functional contributions from each species and their interactions. Filtering our results through the theory of biochemical kinetics, we show that this simple function is additive in the absence of interactions among community members. For about half of the combinatorially assembled consortia, the amylolytic function is dominated by pairwise and higher-order interactions. For the other half, the function is additive despite the presence of strong competitive interactions. We explain the mechanistic basis of these findings and propose a quantitative framework that allows us to separate the effect of behavioral and population dynamics interactions. Our results suggest that the functional robustness of a consortium to pairwise and higher-order interactions critically affects our ability to predict and bottom-up engineer ecosystem function in complex communities.
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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.