Three-dimensional fluorescence imaging of microbial eukaryotes in environmental samples allows accurate automated taxonomic profiling and quantitative data about ultrastructures and interactions of organisms.
A novel computation tool for microbial community modeling predicts the evolution and diversification of E. coli in laboratory evolution experiments and gives insight into the underlying metabolic processes.
An open-source python package for phenotype analyses provides a versatile, modular and user-friendly solution to determine complementary fitness-related traits from large-scale assays of microbial colonies.
To understand how regeneration works across the different scales of living systems, we first need to identify the essential components underlying this process.
Host characteristics drive the assembly of similar communities within the convergently evolved and geographically distant pitcher ecosystems of carnivorous pitcher plants.
High-throughput sequencing has been used to analyze the microbiome of mouse corpses over a period of 48 days, and to provide an accurate estimate of the time since death.
A model of purely competitive ecological dynamics is shown to be equivalent to adaptive evolution of a single individual, suggesting a new way to formalize the "superorganism" metaphor.
Multistability and regime shifts are common and species diversity is high in microbial communities when nutrient supplies are balanced and competing species have different stoichiometries of essential nutrients.
Environmental heterogeneity can dramatically reduce the efficacy of selection and alter the neutral evolutionary dynamics in microbial range expansions.
With mathematical modeling being an important source of insight for microbial communities, we may need to move beyond commonly-used pairwise models that do not capture microbial interactions.
