key challenge is to quantify the functional roles of bacterial taxa in nature to understand how the properties of ecosystems change over time or under different environmental conditions

Hemicellulase activity was elevated in pairwise mixtures of communities that placed interacting phylotypes together (interactions, n = 9 mixtures) but not in communities that did not place interacting phylotypes together (no interactions, n = 56 mixtures)

identify mechanistic drivers of microbial activity, infer meaningful interaction networks, and rationally engineer microbial communities.

Immobilization efficiency was improved by manipulating the bacterial genetics (overproducing curli protein),

Here, we show how three phenomena—Simpson’s paradox, context-dependence, and nonlinear averaging—can lead to erroneous conclusions about population parameters and species interactions when samples contain heterogeneous mixtures of populations or communities.

These issues can be overcome by measuring and accounting for spatial heterogeneity at very small scales

we emphasize how processes and interactions at one spatial or temporal scale contribute to emergent processes and properties at larger or longer scales. Most often the emergent processes we investigate are aquatic ecosystem services, including carbon burial, greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient removal, and recreational fisheries

some of the key questions of microbial community assembly, maintenance and function could be answered by intensively studying one (or a few) synthetic model community

This article discusses, and challenges, some of the often implicit assumptions made in community studies. It suggests greater focus on ecological questions, more critical analysis of accepted concepts and consideration of the fundamental mechanisms controlling microbial processes and interactions in situ

Centralizing content and distributing labor: a community model for curating the very long tail of microbial genomes.