Inside the Paper
A methane leak, some surprising microbes, and unexpected collaborations. This dispatch goes inside the first new research paper from the Chase Lab at SMU and the interdisciplinary detours that turned a simple question — what about the microbes? — into a much bigger story about methane in soil.
Four dispatches before the issue moves to the archive
Ecosystem Ecology
Carbon models will make stronger predictions when they treat microbes and plants not as fixed rate constants, but as diverse, interacting, and evolving communities that change the fate of carbon under environmental change.
Microbial Evolution
Two recent studies of the human gut microbiome reveal contrasting signatures of selective sweeps. Their comparison shows that microbial adaptation depends on the scale at which linkage, recombination, and ecological structure are resolved.
Microbial Evolution
A short conceptual note on interpreting adaptation across genes, genomes, strains, and populations in complex microbial systems.
curated recent(ish) readings from the microbial world [updated with each dispatch]
View all →Microbiome
A nice experimental metagenomics study showing that even when bacterial communities assemble stochastically, their functional patterns are not random due to redundancy, traits, and ecological constraints that together keep the community function partly conserved.
↗Nature Microbiology
A cool paper showing ecosystem functioning X community composition. Using synthetic communities, as BPA contamination becomes more toxic, microbial "cleanup" depends less on individual strains but more on non-additive interactions among strains.
↗Frontiers in Microbiology
A timely opinion piece arguing that high MAG completeness scores can still miss the accessory, mobile, and adaptive genome regions that often matter most for ecological and evolutionary interpretation.
↗Nature
A broad synthesis of food webs showing that biodiversity boosts ecosystem functioning not just through more species, but through trophic structure and predators to keep energy moving through ecosystems.
↗Volume 1 · Issue 1
Microbial diversity is often described through broad taxonomic units, but much of the ecology and evolution of microbes unfolds at a finer scale. Within what appears to be a single microbial “type” lies extensive microdiversity: closely related lineages that differ in genomic composition, ecological preference, functional traits, and evolutionary history. This issue highlights why resolving that fine-scale genetic structure is essential for understanding microbial biogeography.
Open issue →Volume 1 · Issue 2
Microbial evolution is often presented as rapid, flexible, and gene-centered, but the processes shaping microbial genomes are more constrained and context-dependent than that framing suggests. This issue examines how evolutionary change unfolds across microbiomes, pangenomes, mobile genetic elements, cultures, and reconstructed genomes.
Open issue →Volume 2 · Issue 1
Microbial natural products are often studied as sources of new drugs, but they are also ecological traits that shape how microbes interact, persist, and adapt. This issue explores specialized metabolism from discovery to function, emphasizing how genomes, metabolites, environments, and evolutionary history can be integrated to understand microbial chemistry.
Open issue →Volume 2 · Issue 2
Microbial ecology is increasingly moving from describing community patterns to explaining their functional consequences. This issue focuses on that transition: how microbial diversity, biogeography, traits, and activity shape ecosystem processes across soils, oceans, plants, and biogeochemical cycles.
Open issue →Volume 3 · Issue 1
Microbial ecology increasingly depends on connecting hidden genetic diversity to ecological function. This issue focuses on two ways that microbial ecologists make that connection: by resolving fine-scale adaptation within a dominant soil bacterium, and by reconstructing genomes from uncultivated microbes directly from environmental DNA.
Open issue →Volume 3 · Issue 2
Microbial specialized metabolites are often treated as molecules to discover, but they are also ecological traits shaped by evolutionary history and environmental context. This issue focuses on two linked questions: how microbial chemistry evolves, and how that chemistry is organized across natural communities.
Open issue →Volume 4 · Issue 1
This issue is a series of essays built around a central question: how do energy, water, carbon, nutrients, organisms, and Earth materials interact to produce the functioning biosphere? Rather than treating biogeochemical cycles as static diagrams of elemental movement, the course emphasizes fluxes, transformations, feedbacks, and constraints across the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere.
Open issue →Microbial Planet shares concise perspectives on new publications and emerging ideas in microbial ecology, chemical ecology, environmental genomics, and biogeochemistry. Each issue includes four dispatches before moving into the archive, alongside curated literature highlighting recent work across the microbial world.
Learn more about the Chase Lab →
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