ArticleCommunications biology2021
Microfluidic chips provide visual access to in situ soil ecology.
Article in Communications biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reciprocal transport of carbon and nitrogen between plants and the hyphosphere microbiome in a temperate grassland.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Opening the black box: in situ imaging of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal structures in soil using synchrotron-based micro-CT.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Portable and Point-of-Care Testing Approach for Determining Soil Extracellular Enzyme Activities.Micromachines · 2026Article
- Shifts in Rhizosphere and Bulk Soil Microbial Communities During the Second and Third Years of Ginseng Cultivation.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Interplay of Spatial Structure and Interactions in Microbial Communities.Environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Lives in a gram of soil: linking life cycle biology to soil ecology.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- Synthetic soils for ecological and synthetic biology applications.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Article
- Harnessing Beneficial Microbes and Sensor Technologies for Sustainable Smart Agriculture.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Hierarchical Structure of the Program Used by Filamentous Fungi to Navigate in Confining Microenvironments.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Keystone protist suppression triggers mesopredator release and biotic homogenization in complex soil microbial communities.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Visualizing liquid distribution across hyphal networks with cellular resolution.Biomicrofluidics · 2024Article
- Towards establishing a fungal economics spectrum in soil saprobic fungi.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Microfluidic approaches in microbial ecology.Lab on a chip · 2024Review
- Emerging sensing, imaging, and computational technologies to scale nano-to macroscale rhizosphere dynamics - Review and research perspectives.Soil biology & biochemistry · 2024Article
- Distinct microbial communities are linked to organic matter properties in millimetre-sized soil aggregates.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Fabricated devices for performing bacterial-fungal interaction experiments across scales.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Review
- EcoFAB 3.0: a sterile system for studying sorghum that replicates previous field and greenhouse observations.Frontiers in plant science · 2024Article
- Microbe-cellulose hydrogels as a model system for particulate carbon degradation in soil aggregates.ISME communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbes govern most soil functions, but investigation of these processes at the scale of their cells has been difficult to accomplish. Here we incubate microfabricated, transparent 'soil chips' with soil, or bury them directly in the field. Both soil microbes and minerals enter the chips, which enables us to investigate diverse community interdependences, such as inter-kingdom and food-web interactions, and feedbacks between microbes and the pore space microstructures. The presence of hyphae ('fungal highways') strongly and frequently increases the dispersal range and abundance of water-dwelling organisms such as bacteria and protists across air pockets. Physical forces such as water movements, but also organisms and especially fungi form new microhabitats by altering the pore space architecture and distribution of soil minerals in the chip. We show that soil chips hold a large potential for studying in-situ microbial interactions and soil functions, and to interconnect field microbial ecology with laboratory experiments.
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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.