What is it about?
Entire communities of microbes are routinely moved around by a variety of forces, encountering entire other communities as they do so. It turns out that there is not really any vocabulary to describe these situations, and so we coin the term "community coalescence" to capture such cases of entire microbial communities meeting. In the viewpoint paper we describe how these events can happen, and what likely consequences could be.
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Why is it important?
Microbial community coalescence could help explain the staggering diversity that characterizes many microbial assemblages in environments such as soil and others.
Perspectives
It's fun to delve into the microbial world, where suddenly pieces of the environment that are tiny to us can mean a huge habitat, home to an entire microbial system. I don't think there is quite anything like this on the "typical" scale of plants and animals, at least not at ecological timescales.
Professor Matthias C Rillig
Freie Universitat Berlin
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Interchange of entire communities: microbial community coalescence, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, August 2015, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2015.06.004.
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