Microbial communities articles from across Nature Portfolio

A pairwise co-culture study of gut microorganisms shows that microbial interactions drive widespread rewiring of metabolic strategies and give rise to emergent metabolic behaviours.

‘Gut health’ is a widely used term, but there is much uncertainty and inconsistency related to its use. An international panel has now provided a definition that includes consideration of both gastrointestinal function and symptom burden. While advancing the field, the definition also prompts a number of areas of debate.

Soil microbiome community stability is a dynamic and temporal scale-dependent emergent property and is maintained by a temporal scale-driven shift from reliance on species resistance to compensatory asynchrony, according to a decade-long warming experiment in Damxung County, North Tibetan Plateau.

In this Review, Ormsby and Quilliam discuss how plastic pollutants create a critical, novel habitat for complex microbial communities, highlighting the community composition, assembly dynamics and key functional traits of the plastisphere. They explore the dual public health risks of pathogen dissemination and enrichment of antimicrobial-resistance determinants.

Extreme environments host diverse microbes, yet their global diversity remains underexplored. Here, the authors analyze both isolate genomes and metagenomes from various extreme habitats to construct a microbial genomic catalog, and use protein language models to identify antimicrobial peptides active against drug-resistant pathogens.

Habitat transitions can rewire microbial genomes. This study shows how a bacterial lineage crosses ecosystems either by acquiring genes or via hypermutability, where mutation bias—not selection—drives genome reduction and GC decline.

The role of gut microbiota–metabolism crosstalk in polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) remains unclear. Here, the authors revealed that sialic acid exacerbates PCOS pathogenesis by remodeling gut microbial bile acid metabolism and FXR activation.

Here, the authors use single-cell transcriptomics and imaging to profile the Quorum-sensing (QS) response of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Their findings show that heterogeneity differs at each QS stage and that individuality guides cooperation in bacterial populations.

There is an increasing interest in studying antibiotic resistance genes in microbial communities, however, there is no unified way to identify them in metagenomics datasets or to interpret the risks associated with them. In this Comment, the authors discuss current technical challenges and how to mitigate them.

A pairwise co-culture study of gut microorganisms shows that microbial interactions drive widespread rewiring of metabolic strategies and give rise to emergent metabolic behaviours.

This study uncovers how Pseudomonas aeruginosa acquires colistin resistance in magnesium-depleted environments created by Candida albicans by accumulating unique mutations in the lipid A biosynthetic pathway.

This study shows that some human microbiota bacteria can metabolize immunodominant peanut allergens, thus modulating IgE-mediated anaphylaxis.

‘Gut health’ is a widely used term, but there is much uncertainty and inconsistency related to its use. An international panel has now provided a definition that includes consideration of both gastrointestinal function and symptom burden. While advancing the field, the definition also prompts a number of areas of debate.

If confirmed in people, the finding might lead to gut-targeted therapies that could reverse cognitive decline.