ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Linking microbial communities to ecosystem functions: what we can learn from genotype-phenotype mapping in organisms.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Salinity-driven nonlinear responses of microbial functional genes in sediment biogeochemical cycling across a salt lake gradient.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Microbial Diversity, Structure and Predicted Carbon-cycling Pathways Show Partial Convergence in Restored and Natural Salt Marshes in Venice Lagoon.Microbial ecology · 2026Article
- From Flames to the Ocean: Biomass Burning Aerosols Are Associated With Changes in Prokaryotic Communities in the Mediterranean Sea.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Resource diversity and supply drive colonization resistance.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Microllm: a structured information extraction tool using large language models and named entity recognition in microbiology.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2025Article
- Practical applications of soil microbiota to improve ecosystem restoration: current knowledge and future directions.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Revisiting the invasion paradox: Resistance-richness relationship is driven by augmentation and displacement trends.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Decoding populations in the ocean microbiome.Microbiome · 2024Article
- dingo: a Python package for metabolic flux sampling.Bioinformatics advances · 2024Article
- Functional guilds and drivers of diversity in seaweed-associated bacteria.FEMS microbes · 2024Article
- Unlocking secrets of microbial ecotoxicology: recent achievements and future challenges.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2023Review
- Vegetation, topography, and soil depth drive microbial community structure in two Swedish grasslands.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2023Article
- Latent Dirichlet Allocation modeling of environmental microbiomes.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Stronger linkage of diversity-carbon decomposition for rare rather than abundant bacteria in woodland soils.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- A quantitative analysis of microbial community structure-function relationships in plant litter decay.iScience · 2022Review
- Effects of alder- and salmon-derived nutrients on aquatic bacterial community structure and microbial community metabolism in subarctic lakes.Oecologia · 2022Article
- Microbial community structure is stratified at the millimeter-scale across the soil-water interface.ISME communications · 2022Article
- PREGO: A Literature and Data-Mining Resource to Associate Microorganisms, Biological Processes, and Environment Types.Microorganisms · 2022Article
- Non-charismatic waterbodies and ecosystem disservices: Mine pit lakes are underrepresented in the literature.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Review
- Assessing the efficacy of eDNA metabarcoding for measuring microbial biodiversity within forest ecosystems.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbial physiological processes are intimately involved in nutrient cycling. However, it remains unclear to what extent microbial diversity or community composition is important for determining the rates of ecosystem-scale functions. There are many examples of positive correlations between microbial diversity and ecosystem function, but how microbial communities 'map' onto ecosystem functions remain unresolved. This uncertainty limits our ability to predict and manage crucial microbially mediated processes such as nutrient losses and greenhouse gas emissions. To overcome this challenge, we propose integrating traditional biodiversity-ecosystem function research with ideas from genotype-phenotype mapping in organisms. We identify two insights from genotype-phenotype mapping that could be useful for microbial biodiversity-ecosystem function studies: the concept of searching 'agnostically' for markers of ecosystem function and controlling for population stratification to identify microorganisms uniquely associated with ecosystem function. We illustrate the potential for these approaches to elucidate microbial biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships by analysing a subset of published data measuring methane oxidation rates from tropical soils. We assert that combining the approaches of traditional biodiversity-ecosystem function research with ideas from genotype-phenotype mapping will generate novel hypotheses about how complex microbial communities drive ecosystem function and help scientists predict and manage changes to ecosystem functions resulting from human activities. This article is part of the theme issue 'Conceptual challenges in microbial community ecology'.
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