Emergent simplicity in microbial community assembly

Interchanging species of similar function Under natural conditions, bacteria form mixed, interacting communities. Understanding how such communities assemble and stabilize is important in a range of contexts, from biotechnological applications to what happens in our guts. Goldford et al. sampled the microbial communities from soil and plants containing hundreds to thousands of sequence variants. The organisms were passaged after culture in low concentrations of single carbon sources and were cross-fed with each other's metabolites; then, the resulting communities were sequenced using 16S ribosomal RNA, and the outcomes were modeled mathematically. The mix of species that survived under steady conditions converged reproducibly to reflect the experimentally imposed conditions rather than the mix of species initially inoculated—although at coarse phylogenetic levels, taxonomic patterns persisted. Science , this issue p. 469