Ecology and exploration of the rare biosphere

By M. Lynch, Josh D. Neufeld. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2015

1,101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Embracing the unknown: disentangling the complexities of the soil microbiome (2017, background): “At finer levels of taxonomic resolution, most individual bacterial and archaeal species are rare, and relatively few are abundant in any given community 18 ; this structure is similar to that observed in many plant and animal resident communities 19 .”
Thousands of microbial genomes shed light on interconnected biogeochemical processes in an aquifer system (2016, methodology): “Microbial communities across various environments have been documented to contain thousands of different species, most of which occur at low abundance, and thus are members of the ‘rare biosphere’ 20 .”
Direct and indirect effects of climate change on soil microbial and soil microbial‐plant interactions: What lies ahead? (2015, methodology): “Although this method yields data relevant to potential function, it lacks the depth associated with amplicon sequencing, so rare taxa may be overlooked (Shade et al. 2014, Lynch and Neufeld 2015, Zhou et al. 2015).”
Where less may be more: how the rare biosphere pulls ecosystems strings (2017, methodology): “Given the obstacles to exploring rare microbes and the rapid advances in experimental approaches, we provide a condensed summary of methods and strategies that can be employed to address the most pressing questions in this field (Table 2, see also Reid and Buckley, 2011; Lynch and Neufeld, 2015).”