ArticleNature communications2021
Non-additive microbial community responses to environmental complexity.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cross-feeding enables robust coexistence between four bacterial species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Increased nutrient diversity can induce loss of microbial diversity through enhanced resource uptake.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Exploring the native pulp and paper sludge microbiome to inspire new biotechnologies for waste minimization.Microbiology spectrum · 2026Article
- Metabolic feedbacks drive population dynamics and can lead to oscillations among leaf bacteria.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A Concept Using α-Niche Evolution Within Bacterial Communities to Direct β-Niche Evolution of Focal Species.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Bacterial necromass recycling promotes diversity maintenance in bacterial communities via resource partitioning.Nature ecology & evolution · 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
- Environmental complexity shapes maintenance of bacterial diversity through context-dependent interactions among niche axes.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Metabolic blueprints of monocultures enable prediction and design of synthetic microbial consortia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Sugar ABC transporter repertoires predict ecological dynamics in gut microbiome communities.Research square · 2026Article
- Community state shifts driven by total carbon availability over resource complexity in a synthetic microbial community.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Linking shelter conditions to health: A multisystem analysis of stress, metabolism, and fecal microbiota in dogs.PloS one · 2026Article
- Microbial model communities exhibit widespread metabolic interdependencies.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Accuracy of the Lotka-Volterra model fails in strongly coupled microbial consumer-resource systems.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Biofilm development ofMicrobiology spectrum · 2025Article
- Biophysical metabolic modeling of complex bacterial colony morphology.Cell systems · 2025Article
- Exposure to Rice Straw Ash Alters Survival, Development and Microbial Diversity in Amphibian Tadpoles.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- COmmunity and Single Microbe Optimisation System (COSMOS).NPJ systems biology and applications · 2025Article
- Dominant foliar endophytes influence soybean yield and transcriptome.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2025Article
- Metabolic network reconstruction as a resource for analyzing Salmonella Typhimurium SL1344 growth in the mouse intestine.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Environmental composition is a major, though poorly understood, determinant of microbiome dynamics. Here we ask whether general principles govern how microbial community growth yield and diversity scale with an increasing number of environmental molecules. By assembling hundreds of synthetic consortia in vitro, we find that growth yield can remain constant or increase in a non-additive manner with environmental complexity. Conversely, taxonomic diversity is often much lower than expected. To better understand these deviations, we formulate metrics for epistatic interactions between environments and use them to compare our results to communities simulated with experimentally-parametrized consumer resource models. We find that key metabolic and ecological factors, including species similarity, degree of specialization, and metabolic interactions, modulate the observed non-additivity and govern the response of communities to combinations of resource pools. Our results demonstrate that environmental complexity alone is not sufficient for maintaining community diversity, and provide practical guidance for designing and controlling microbial ecosystems.
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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.