ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Closed microbial communities self-organize to persistently cycle carbon.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- The failure and revival of closed microbial ecosystems: evidence from the shifts in microbial and chemical diversities.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Collective Microbial Effects Drive Toxin Bioremediation and Enable Rational Design.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Microbial functional guilds respond cohesively to rapidly fluctuating environments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Synthetic communities as a model for determining interactions between a biofertilizer chassis organism and native microbial consortia.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Environment-Organism Feedbacks Drive Changes in Ecological Interactions.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Synthetic Ecosystems: From the Test Tube to the Biosphere.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Review
- Environmental modulators of algae-bacteria interactions at scale.Cell systems · 2024Article
- Applications of the MicroalgaeLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Closed ecosystems extract energy through self-organized nutrient cycles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Statistical prediction of microbial metabolic traits from genomes.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Evolutionary repeatability of emergent properties of ecological communities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Formation and emergent dynamics of spatially organized microbial systems.Interface focus · 2023Review
- Review
- The Diversity and Functional Capacity of Microbes Associated with Coastal Macrophytes.mSystems · 2022Article
- Review
- Long-Term Stability of Bacterial Associations in a Microcosm ofFrontiers in plant science · 2022Article
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
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cycles of nutrients (N, P, etc.) and resources (C) are a defining emergent feature of ecosystems. Cycling plays a critical role in determining ecosystem structure at all scales, from microbial communities to the entire biosphere. Stable cycles are essential for ecosystem persistence because they allow resources and nutrients to be regenerated. Therefore, a central problem in ecology is understanding how ecosystems are organized to sustain robust cycles. Addressing this problem quantitatively has proved challenging because of the difficulties associated with manipulating ecosystem structure while measuring cycling. We address this problem using closed microbial ecosystems (CES), hermetically sealed microbial consortia provided with only light. We develop a technique for quantifying carbon cycling in hermetically sealed microbial communities and show that CES composed of an alga and diverse bacterial consortia self-organize to robustly cycle carbon for months. Comparing replicates of diverse CES, we find that carbon cycling does not depend strongly on the taxonomy of the bacteria present. Moreover, despite strong taxonomic differences, self-organized CES exhibit a conserved set of metabolic capabilities. Therefore, an emergent carbon cycle enforces metabolic but not taxonomic constraints on ecosystem organization. Our study helps establish closed microbial communities as model ecosystems to study emergent function and persistence in replicate systems while controlling community composition and the environment.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.