We can explain solids, liquids, and gases — but how nonliving matter self-assembles into life remains one of science’s great mysteries.

Antarctic soils represent one of the most extreme environments for microbial life on Earth, yet they harbor heterogeneous and diverse microbial com...

Bees often exhibit gut microbiome-defined enterotypes impacting their health and pollination services. Bumblebees, keystone pollinators in montane and agriculture ecosystems, face significant populati...

Microbial metabolism affects the magnitude and stability of soil organic carbon. This Review examines how microbial heterotrophic respiration and soil carbon stocks will be affected by climate change ...

The microbiota is being increasingly recognized for its ability to regulate host physiology through the production of small bioactive molecules. However, how host-derived nutrients are metabolically t...

Positive species interactions underpin ecological resilience, which is critical for counteracting anthropogenic pressures on ecosystems. Current research focuses on intra-holobiont interactions betwee...

Regenerative agriculture is gaining attention as a way to make agriculture more sustainable and to better integrate natural processes. Here, we highlight how the soil microbiome critically contributes...

The beneficial fungus Trichoderma acts through the secreted swollenin ThSWO, which crosses the plant cell wall and engages AtABCB5, an auxin efflux carrier, at the host cell surface. This effector-tra...

Uniting life’s seen and unseen realms guides a conceptual advance in research

Inoculation with plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria SQR9 enhances cooperative behaviors and compatibility within the microbial community, promoting plant growth. Building on these interactions, syn...

Rising climate and local pressures increase the risk of regime shifts, yet despite progress, thresholds remain difficult to identify early enough to take action. We argue that this shortfall reflects ...

First-principles approaches, based on physics or chemistry, are key pillars of biological theory. Despite their value, there are recurrent problems with many first-principles approaches in biology: th...

From ecological principles to precision engineering of plant microbiomes for sustainable agriculture. The plant holobiont integrates diverse microbial niches (including rhizosphere, endosphere, phyll...

The traditional model of plant–arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal coevolution, based solely on interactions between plants and AM fungi, became obsolete with the discovery of the critical roles that b...

Fecal microbiome transplant up-regulates immune tolerance pathways in food allergy.

Harnessing the plant microbiome through plant genetics is of increasing interest to those seeking to improve plant nutrition and health. While genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been conduc...

Wan et al. reveal that rice-fish coculture enhances invertebrate natural enemies (i.e., predators and parasitoids), suppresses pests (i.e., invertebrate herbivores, diseases, and weeds), and boosts ri...

Engineered plant-associated microbiomes provide a transformative approach for sustainable agriculture. In this Forum, we explore five strategies encompassing synthetic community design, native bacteri...

The gut microbiome influences human health, yet microbiome-mediated therapies have lagged as metagenomics identifies gut-colonizing microbes without clarifying functional networks. Prior microbiome “r...

In competition, plant performance in conspecific and heterospecific soils is determined not only by negative or positive plant–soil feedbacks but also by neighbours inducing changes in the root microb...

The evolutionary emergence of complex multicellularity in bacteria and fungi, such as the ability for mycelial growth, is strongly associated with increased genomic carriage of biosynthetic machinery ...

Habitat loss and fragmentation are among the greatest threats to biodiversity. Here the authors show that habitat quality of the surrounding landscape can also affect demographic rates and population ...

Beneficial root-colonizing fungi such as Trichoderma promote plant growth and immunity, yet the contribution of fungal small RNAs (sRNAs) to these interactions remains poorly understood. Here, we id...

In this Perspective, Banerjee, Dasgupta and van der Heijden discuss how intensive agricultural practices can lead to the taxonomic, physiological, genetic and functional homogenization of microbial co...

Soil microbes drive ecosystem functions but are vulnerable to environmental stressors triggered by global change. This study reveals that multiple environmental stressors drive community-level restruc...

In this Review, Rillig explores the diversity of fungi in the soil ecosystem, their ecological interactions and diverse ecological roles in terrestrial ecosystems as well as anthropogenic factors that...

Despite growing investments in nature-based solutions for urban resilience, their design often overlooks a fundamental biological process: evolution. Populations of organisms that sustain nature-based...

The challenge of producing food at low monetary cost comes with high environmental impacts as yield maximization by excessive fertilization and chemical pest control drive farmers away from using the ...

Proposed conceptual model of cultivar-dependent early rhizosphere microbiome assembly under WYMV disease pressure.

Graphical representation of experimental setup. Quercus spp. seeds were collected at two origins: upper Rhine basin (URB) and north German lowland (NGL).

An analysis of 97 million citations has found that rates of fabricated citations have climbed steeply since 2023.

Synthesis and applications. Our findings provide a unifying framework for understanding how transient microbial invasions generate lasting ecological imbalances, cascading from community structure to....

Plant phenology tends to track with climate warming, but it could also be sensitive to biotic factors. This study from a temperate forest landscape in Germany shows that a single year of tree response...

Breeding for plant–microorganism interactions is challenging, and existing approaches remain conceptually fragmented. We distinguish the ‘varying population’, comprising organisms that harbor heritabl...

The interaction of plant and soil microbiome is a source of ecosystem complexity with implications for plant adaptation to environmental stress. Howev…

The role of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in the decomposition of soil organic carbon (C) may be substantial. However, how species at high trophi…

Une étude récente pointe un chiffre alarmant : plus de 250 000 articles scientifiques liés au cancer pourraient avoir été fabriqués de toutes pièces entre 1999 et 2024.

Plant immunity should be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of the plant genome. We propose that the rhizosphere microbiome may function analogously to a decentralized immune system, contributing adap...

Abstract. Carbon availability is a key determinant of soil microbial community structure and function, shaping their metabolic activities and interactions.