ArticleNature ecology & evolution2024
Metabolic complexity drives divergence in microbial communities.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Diverse Microbial Communities Assemble on Both Recalcitrant and Labile Carbon Sources.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Exploring Metabolic Interaction between Ophiostoma novo-ulmi and Geosmithia spp.Microbial ecology · 2026Article
- Phage-mediated expansion of the virulence gene types and enhanced ecological integration of pathogens in wild mice from human-impacted environments.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2026Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of massive, parallel bacteriophage outbreaks in compost communities.Science advances · 2026Article
- Dual-BONCAT reveals distinct subpopulations of anabolically active cells.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Soil microbial community assembly drives ecosystem multifunctionality under grazing disturbance by regulating diversity and network structure.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Predator-mediated local convergence fosters global microbial community divergence.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Heterogeneous responses of soil microbial communities and functions in coastal wetlands to long-term nitrogen deposition.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2026Article
- The core microbiome of the AMF hyphosphere: mineralization mechanisms of key soil mineral elements.Mycorrhiza · 2026Review
- Article
- Metabolic blueprints of monocultures enable prediction and design of synthetic microbial consortia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Community state shifts driven by total carbon availability over resource complexity in a synthetic microbial community.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Convergent GenX biodegradation by genomically designed and functionally screened synthetic bacterial consortia.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Microbial cohorts: bringing ecological meaning to the modularity concept of co-occurrence networks.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Stratification-driven divergence between taxonomic and functional diversity in a deep lake microbiome.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2025Article
- Functional diversity of soil microbial communities increases with ecosystem development.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Modeling the emergent metabolic potential of soil microbiomes in Atacama landscapes.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Strengthen or Weaken: Evolutionary Directions of Cross-Feeding After Formation.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Integrative systems biology approaches for analyzing microbiome dysbiosis and species interactions.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2025Review
- Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Microbial communities are shaped by environmental metabolites, but the principles that govern whether different communities will converge or diverge in any given condition remain unknown, posing fundamental questions about the feasibility of microbiome engineering. Here we studied the longitudinal assembly dynamics of a set of natural microbial communities grown in laboratory conditions of increasing metabolic complexity. We found that different microbial communities tend to become similar to each other when grown in metabolically simple conditions, but they diverge in composition as the metabolic complexity of the environment increases, a phenomenon we refer to as the divergence-complexity effect. A comparative analysis of these communities revealed that this divergence is driven by community diversity and by the assortment of specialist taxa capable of degrading complex metabolites. An ecological model of community dynamics indicates that the hierarchical structure of metabolism itself, where complex molecules are enzymatically degraded into progressively simpler ones that then participate in cross-feeding between community members, is necessary and sufficient to recapitulate our experimental observations. In addition to helping understand the role of the environment in community assembly, the divergence-complexity effect can provide insight into which environments support multiple community states, enabling the search for desired ecosystem functions towards microbiome engineering applications.
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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.