ArticleMicrobiology (Reading, England)2024
Characterizing a stable five-species microbial community for use in experimental evolution and ecology.
Article in Microbiology (Reading, England), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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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.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Coexistence Theory for Microbial Ecology, and Vice Versa.Environmental microbiology · 2025Pooled it
- A microbiologist's field guide to community ecology.ISME communications · 2026Review
- An experimental outlook on investigating temporal-scale dynamics of microbial communities.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Community Complexity Does Not Weaken Pairwise Coevolution in a Soil Bacterial Community.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Exploring Bacterial Interactions Under the Stress Gradient Hypothesis in Response to Selenium Stress.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Bacteria-phage (co)evolution is constrained in a synthetic community across multiple bacteria-phage pairs.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2025Article
- Microbial community structure is affected by phage-resistance associated increases in host density.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2025Article
- Estimates of microbial community stability using relative invader growth rates are robust across levels of invader species richness.ISME communications · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
12 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Model microbial communities are regularly used to test ecological and evolutionary theory as they are easy to manipulate and have fast generation times, allowing for large-scale, high-throughput experiments. A key assumption for most model microbial communities is that they stably coexist, but this is rarely tested experimentally. Here we report the (dis)assembly of a five-species microbial community from a metacommunity of soil microbes that can be used for future experiments. Using reciprocal invasion-from-rare experiments we show that all species can coexist and we demonstrate that the community is stable for a long time (~600 generations). Crucially for future work, we show that each species can be identified by their plate morphologies, even after >1 year in co-culture. We characterise pairwise species interactions and produce high-quality reference genomes for each species. This stable five-species community can be used to test key questions in microbial ecology and evolution.
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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.