Category Archives: Microbial Ecology

February 18th, 2023

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Bonjour from Paris, France !

In today’s digest you will find a broad range of amazing preprints and published papers! An amazing read is a fresh preprint from Fritz and collaborator describing an exciting method of sampling in difficult to reach environments. The authors used army ants of the genus Dorylus which are foragers to survey the viral diversity of plants, vertebrate and invertebrates of the tropical forest!

Today’s non-microbiology pick is an opinion piece on the current state and limitation of viral taxonomy. In this piece, Simmonds and collaborators, provide concrete recommendations to guide the development of a coherent and comprehensive virus taxonomy.

Have a great Saturday!

Pregnancy and early life

The investigation of the association of pregnancy weight gain on maternal and neonatal gut microbiota composition and abundance using 16sRNA sequencing – Song and Liu – BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth

Human gut microbiome

The diet rapidly and differentially affects the gut microbiota and host lipid mediators in a healthy population – Bourdeau-Julien et al. – Microbiome

Review: Conversations in the Gut: The Role of Quorum Sensing in Normobiosis – Markus et al. – International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Review: Gut Microbiome and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Link Yet to Be Disclosed – Illiodromiti et al. – Microorganisms

Natural Green Spaces, Sensitization to Allergens, and the Role of Gut Microbiota during Infancy – Buchholz et al. – mSystems

Animal experiments

Mimicking seasonal changes in light-dark cycle and ambient temperature modulates gut microbiome in mice under the same dietary regimen – Matsumoto et al – Plos One

Animal microbiome

Preprint: Taurine as a key intermediate for host-symbiont interaction in the tropical sponge Ianthella basta – Moeller et al. – BioRxiV

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Preprint: Transmission of synthetic seed bacterial communities to radish seedlings: impact on microbiota assembly and plant phenotype – Simonin et al. – BioRxiV

Preprint: Viral but not bacterial community succession is characterized by extreme turnover shortly after rewetting dry soils – Santos-Medellin et al. – BioRxiV

Ecological drivers and potential functions of viral communities in flooded arsenic-contaminated paddy soils – Gao et al. – Science of the total environment

Water and extremophile microbiome

Preprint: Redefinition of archetypal phytoplankton-associated bacteria taxa based on globally distributed dinoflagellates and diatoms – Yang et al. – BioRxiV

Preprint: Plastic Leachate Exposure Drives Antibiotic Resistance and Virulence in Marine Bacterial Communities – Vlaanderen et al. – BioRxiV

Phages and viruses

Preprint: African army ants at the forefront of virome surveillance in a remote tropical forest – Fritz et al. – BioRxiV

Techniques

Preprint: Dancing the Nanopore limbo – Nanopore metagenomics from small DNA quantities for bacterial genome reconstruction – Simon et al. – BioRxiV

Preprint: The long and short of it: Benchmarking viromics using Illumina, Nanopore and PacBio sequencing technologies – Cook et al. – BioRxiV

Non microbiology pick

Opinion: Four principles to establish a universal virus taxonomy – Simmonds et al. – PLoS Biology

February 13, 2023

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Today’s reading recommendation is a microbiota review collection edited by Lindsay Hall and Melanie Schirmer.

Happy Monday and see you at #MVIF!

Vaginal microbiome

Gardnerella Diversity and Ecology in Pregnancy and Preterm Birth – Hanna L. Berman – bioRxiv

Heterogeneity of the group B streptococcal type VII secretion system and influence on colonization of the female genital tract – Brady L. Spencer – bioRxiv

Urinary microbiome

Comparative Genomic Study of Streptococcus anginosus Reveals Distinct Group of Urinary Strains – Ananya Prasad – mSphere

Human gut

Gut microbes predominantly act as symbiotic partners rather than raw nutrients – Nuno Felipe da Silva Soares – bioRxiv

Antibiotic resistance in the commensal human gut microbiota – Lisa E Lamberte, Willem van Schaik – Current Opinion in Microbiology

Identifying glycan consumers in human gut microbiota samples using metabolic labeling coupled with fluorescence-activated cell sorting – Lharbi Dridi – Nature Communications

Animal experiments

Over supplementation with vitamin B12 alters microbe-host interactions in the gut leading to accelerated Citrobacter rodentium colonization and pathogenesis in mice – Andrew J. Forgie – Microbiome

Disturbance of lipid metabolism in germ-free mice transplanted with gut microbiota of DSS-induced colitis mice – Chungho Lee – Plos One

Bioinformatics

Accurate and fast graph-based pangenome annotation and clustering with ggCaller – Samuel T. Horsfield – bioRxiv

Brief report: uBin – a manual refining tool for genomes from metagenomes – Till L V Bornemann – Environmental Microbiology

In-situ metagenomics: A platform for rapid sequencing and analysis of metagenomes in less than one day – Javier Tamames – bioRxiv

The virtual microbiome: A computational framework to evaluate microbiome analyses – Belén Serrano-Antón – Plos One

February 4th, 2023

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Bonjour from Paris, France !

In today’s digest you will find a wide variety of interesting preprints and published research papers encompassing very interesting microbiome such as Yak calves rumen, compost, wineyard soil and lichen symbionth microbiota!

If you are interested in virome, I recommend looking at the fascinating preprint from Ha and collaborators investigating the biogeography of giant viruses from the phylum Nucleocytoviricota. They leveraged the bioGEOTRACES metagenomic dataset collected across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to recovered novel genomes from these viruses and identified geographical patterns of distribution.

If you are working on human microbiomes, I recommend checking out a really interesting preprint, comparing the biases and strengths of four commercially available DNA extraction kits frequently used for whole genome shotgun analysis of the human microbiome.

Have a great Saturday!

Events and jobs

Event: Cell Symposia: Infection biology in the age of the microbiome. Paris, France June 7-9

Event: 55th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. Vienna, Austria 17-20 May

Pregnancy and early life

Insufficient Evidence of a Breastmilk Microbiota at Six-Weeks Postpartum: A Pilot Study – Leech et al. – Nutrients

Effects of Perinatal Antibiotic Exposure and Neonatal Gut Microbiota – Morreale et al. – Antibiotics

Necrotizing Enterocolitis: The Role of Hypoxia, Gut Microbiome, and Microbial Metabolites – Kaplina et al. – International Journal of Molecular sciences

Human gut microbiome

Preprint: Functional assignment of gut-specific archaeal proteins in the human gut microbiome – Novikova et al. – BioRxiv

Animal microbiome

Combining vertebrate mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene sequencing and shotgun metagenomic sequencing to investigate the diet of the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) in Korea – Woo et al. – PLOS ONE

The association between gingivitis and oral spirochetes in young cats and dogs – Yamaki et al. – PLOS ONE

Maternal rumen and milk microbiota shapes the establishment of early-life rumen microbiota in grazing yak calves – Guo et al. – Journal of Dairy Science

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Preprint: Fundamentals of biofilm formation in soil: From functionalized self-assembled monolayers to rewilding – Hendiani et al. – BioRxiv

Local conditions matter: Minimal and variable effects of soil disturbance on microbial communities and functions in European vineyards – Steiner et al. – PLOS ONE

Preprint: Evidence for a core set of microbial lichen symbionts from a global survey of metagenomes – Tagirdzhanova et al. – BioRxiv

Water and extremophile microbiome

Preprint: Assessing the biogeography of marine giant viruses in four oceanic transects – Ha et al. – BioRxiv

Preprint: Cross-domain interactions induce community stability to benthic biofilms in proglacial streams – Busi et al. – BioRxiv

Opinion: Viral infection in the ocean—A journey across scales – Vincent and Vardi – PLOS biology

Bioinformatics

Preprint: Identifying and tracking mobile elements in evolving compost communities yields insights into the nanobiome – Van Dijk et al – BioRxiv

Techniques

Preprint: Comparison of commercial DNA extraction kits for whole metagenome sequencing of human oral, vaginal, and rectal microbiome samples – Wright et al – BioRxiv

January 13, 2023

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The very first 2023 digest features HMOs, antimicrobials and the neonatal gut microbiota, cheese community, cow rumen microbiome, SemiBin2, and more. Happy Friday and see you next week at #MVIF!

Food microbiome

*Longitudinal, Multi-Platform Metagenomics Yields a High-Quality Genomic Catalog and Guides an In Vitro Model for Cheese Communities – Christina C. Saak – mSystems

Gut microbiome

*Human milk oligosaccharides, antimicrobial drugs, and the gut microbiota of term neonates: observations from the KOALA birth cohort study – D.J.M Barnett – Gut microbes

The gut microbiota in multiple sclerosis varies with disease activity – Florence Thirion – Genome Medicine

Review: Intestinal gas production by the gut microbiota: A review – Erasme Mutuyemungu – Journal of Functional Foods

Gestational diabetes is driven by microbiota-induced inflammation months before diagnosis – Yishay Pinto – Gut

Review: The gut microbiota is an emerging target for improving brain health during ageing – Marcus Boehme – Gut microbiome

Vaginal microbiome

Commensal Lactobacilli Metabolically Contribute to Cervical Epithelial Homeostasis in a Species-Specific Manner – Nicole R. Jimenez – mSphere

Preterm birth is associated with xenobiotics and predicted by the vaginal metabolome – William F. Kindschuh – Nature Microbiology

Animal experiment

Gut microbiota of the young ameliorates physical fitness of the aged in mice – Kwang H. Kim – Microbiome

Catheterization of mice triggers resurgent urinary tract infection seeded by a bladder reservoir of Acinetobacter baumannii – Jennie E. Hazen – Science Translational Medicine

Prebiotic intervention with HAMSAB in untreated essential hypertensive patients assessed in a phase II randomized trial – Hamdi A. Jama – Nature Cardiovascular Research

Akkermansia muciniphila protects mice against an emerging tick-borne viral pathogen – Jinyan Xie – Nature Microbiology

Animal microbiome

Beehives possess their own distinct microbiomes – Lorenzo A. Santorelli – Environmental Microbiome

*Differential carbon utilization enables co-existence of recently speciated Campylobacteraceae in the cow rumen epithelial microbiome – Cameron R. Strachan – Nature Microbiology

Bioinformatics

Ecological landscapes guide the assembly of optimal microbial communities – Ashish B. George and Kirill S. Korolev – Plos Computational Biology

Over-optimism in unsupervised microbiome analysis: Insights from network learning and clustering – Theresa Ullmann – Plos Computational Biology

Ten simple rules for using public biological data for your research – Vishal H. Oza – Plos Computational Biology

*SemiBin2: self-supervised contrastive learning leads to better MAGs for short- and long-read sequencing – Shaojun Pan – bioRxiv

December 12, 2022

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Today’s digest has the kind of articles I like best–they are all focused on the unique relationship between microbial communities and their niche environments. These environments span everything from rice seeds to the Mariana Trench to the gut microbiome and even Appalachian coalbeds. Happy reading!


Human gut microbiome

Gut microbiome of helminth-infected indigenous Malaysians is context dependent – Tee et al. – Microbiome

Animal experiments

Taurine metabolism is modulated in Vibrio-infected Penaeus vannamei to shape shrimp antibacterial response and survival – Wang et al. – Microbiome


Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Multi-genome metabolic modeling predicts functional inter-dependencies in the Arabidopsis root microbiome – Mataigne et al. – Microbiome

Dynamics of rice microbiomes reveal core vertically transmitted seed endophytes – Zhang et al. – Microbiome


Water and extremophile microbiome

Comparison of prokaryotes between Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench – Liu et al. – Microbiome


Built environment

Predominance of Methanomicrobiales and diverse hydrocarbon-degrading taxa in the Appalachian coalbed biosphere revealed through metagenomics and genome-resolved metabolisms – Ross et al. – Environmental Microbiology

Evaluation of the Microbial Community and Geochemistry in Produced Waters Collected from CO2 EOR in the Niagaran Pinnacle Reef – Stemple et al. – ACS Earth Space Chem

December 9, 2022

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Today’s digest features global antimicrobial resistance, comammox and anammox bacteria in wastewater treatment, mOTUs3, and more. Check out Elisa Granato & Christoph Ziegenhain’s story about postdoc life. Happy Friday and see you next week at #MVIF!

Global microbiome & resistome

Experimental temperatures shape host microbiome diversity and composition – Jingdi Li – Global Change Biology

Global biogeography and projection of soil antibiotic resistance genes – Zheng et al. – Science Advances

*Genomic analysis of sewage from 101 countries reveals global landscape of antimicrobial resistance – Patrick Munk – Nature Communications

Blood microbiome

No evidence for a common blood microbiome based on a population study of 9,770 healthy humans – Cedric C.S. Tan – bioRxiv

Gut microbiome

Effects of dog ownership on the gut microbiota of elderly owners – Chaona Jiang – Plos One

Prokaryotic and viral genomes recovered from 787 Japanese gut metagenomes revealed microbial features linked to diets, populations, and diseases – Yoshihiko Tomofuji – Cell Genomics

Gut microbiome-wide association study of depressive symptoms – Djawad Radjabzadeh – Nature Communications

Development of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis is associated with gut microbiota but not oxysterol synthesis – Jacqueline Wyss – bioRxiv

The microbiome’s fiber degradation profile and its relationship with the host diet – Yotam Cohen & Elhanan Borenstein – BMC Biology

Animal microbiome

Lactobacillus reuteri improves the development and maturation of fecal microbiota in piglets through mother-to-infant microbe and metabolite vertical transmission – Gang Wang – Microbiome

Live biotherapeutics

Development of a live biotherapeutic throat spray with lactobacilli targeting respiratory viral infections – Irina Spacova – Microbial Biotechnology

Soil/root/plant microbiome

Differential microbial assembly processes and co-occurrence networks in the soil-root continuum along an environmental gradient – Yangquanwei Zhong – iMeta

Water microbiome

*Co-occurrence and cooperation between comammox and anammox bacteria in a full-scale attached growth municipal wastewater treatment process – Katherine J Vilardi – bioRxiv

Full-scale activated sludge transplantation reveals a highly resilient community structure – Giulia Dottorini – Water Research

Bioinformatics

Towards complete representation of bacterial contents in metagenomic samples – Xiaowen Feng, Heng Li – arXiv

*Cultivation-independent genomes greatly expand taxonomic-profiling capabilities of mOTUs across various environments – Hans-Joachim Ruscheweyh – Microbiome

Database Resources of the National Genomics Data Center, China National Center for Bioinformation in 2023 – CNCB-NGDC Members and Partners – Nucleic Acids Research

Nanopore long-read-only metagenomics enables complete and high-quality genome reconstruction from mock and complex metagenomes – Lei Liu – Microbiome

November 8, 2022

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Greetings from Pittsburgh, PA!

It’s election day here, which means I have low grade nausea and am looking for a distraction. If you’re in the same boat, check out today’s awesome articles on a holobiont deep sea shrimp, plant-microbiome assemblies of poplar trees, and viral community-wide auxiliary metabolic genes. I also included a few interesting preprints, my favorite of which is noted below and uses a microbiome public dataset to compare different normalization and transformation methods.

Animal microbiome

A novel and dual digestive symbiosis scales up the nutrition and immune system of the holobiont Rimicaris exoculata – Aubé et al. – Microbiome

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Plant sex affects plant-microbiome assemblies of dioecious Populus cathayana trees under different soil nitrogen conditions – Guo et al. – Microbiome

Phages and viruses

Viral community-wide auxiliary metabolic genes differ by lifestyles, habitats, and hosts – Luo et al. – Microbiome

Techniques

*Preprint: Alpha and beta-diversities performance comparison between different normalization methods and centered log-ratio transformation in a microbiome public dataset – Bars-Cortina – bioRxiv

Preprint: Noise reduction strategies in metagenomic chromosome confirmation capture to link antibiotic resistance genes to microbial hosts – McCallum et al. – bioRxiv

Preprint: Targeted metagenomics using probe capture detects a larger diversity of nitrogen and methane cycling genes in complex microbial communities than traditional metagenomics – Siljanen et al. – bioRxiv

November 02, 2022

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General microbiome

[RETRACTION]Metagenomic analysis exploring taxonomic and functional diversity of bacterial communities of a Himalayan urban fresh water lake – Ahmad et al. – PLOS One

Pregnancy and early life

A distinct clade of Bifidobacterium longum in the gut of Bangladeshi children thrives during weaning – Vatanen et al. – Clee

Multi-site human microbiome

[REVIEW]Recent advances in systemic lupus erythematosus and microbiota: from bench to bedside – Zhan et al. –

Human vaginal microbiome

Identification of shared bacterial strains in the vaginal microbiota of related and unrelated reproductive-age mothers and daughters using genome-resolved metagenomics – France et al. – PLOS One

Human gut microbiome

Gut microbiome dysbiosis in antibiotic-treated COVID-19 patients is associated with microbial translocation and bacteremia – Bernard-Raichon et al. – Nature Communications

Gut microbiota and myocardial fibrosis – Xu, Yang & Bao – European Journal of Pharmacology

Assessing the relationship between physical activity and the gut microbiome in a large, population-based sample of Wisconsin adults – Holzhausen et al. – PLOS One

Challenges and costs of donor screening for fecal microbiota transplantations – Bernard et al. – PLOS One

Animal microbiome

Gut colonization by Proteobacteria alters host metabolism and modulates cocaine neurobehavioral responses – Cuesta et al. – Cell Host & Microbe

Enriching captivity conditions with natural elements does not prevent the loss of wild-like gut microbiota but shapes its compositional variation in two small mammals – Koziol et al. – Microbiology Open

Understanding the Dynamic of POMS Infection and the Role of Microbiota Composition in the Survival of Pacific Oysters, Crassostrea gigas – Delisle et al. – Microbiology Spectrum

Changes in Gut Microbiota Structure: A Potential Pathway for Silver Nanoparticles to Affect the Host Metabolism – Wang et al. – ACS Nano

Skin microbiota of oxazolone-induced contact hypersensitivity mouse model – Mäenpää et al. – PLOS One

Effects of a farm-specific fecal microbial transplant (FMT) product on clinical outcomes and fecal microbiome composition in preweaned dairy calves – Slanzon et al. – PLOS One

Multiomics Characterization of the Canada Goose Fecal Microbiome Reveals Selective Efficacy of Simulated Metagenomes – Gil & Hird – Microbiology Spectrum

Uropygial gland microbiota differ between free-living and captive songbirds – Grieves et al. – Scientific Reports

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Crop management shapes the diversity and activity of DNA and RNA viruses in the rhizosphere – Muscatt et al. – Microbiome

Bioinformatics

CRAMdb: a comprehensive database for composition and roles of microbiome in animals – Lei et al. – NAR

Techniques

DNA extraction bias is more pronounced for microbial eukaryotes than for prokaryotes – Brauer & Bengtsson – Microbiology Open

synDNA—a Synthetic DNA Spike-in Method for Absolute Quantification of Shotgun Metagenomic Sequencing – Zaramela et al. – mSystems

September 22, 2022

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Happy almost Friday! Today’s digest includes a time series tracking changes after fecal transplant, biofilm-formation analysis from isolations from swine slaughterhouses as well as techniques to improve computational notebooks, rapid genotyping, and more.

Enjoy!

Human gut microbiome

Time series strain tracking analysis post fecal transplantation identifies individual specific patterns of fecal dominant donor, recipient, and unrelated microbial strains – Koo & Morrow – PLOS One

Animal experiments

Microbiome complexity shapes metabolism – Litichevskiy & Thaiss – PLOS Biology

Minimal overall divergence of the gut microbiome in an adaptive radiation of Cyprinodon pupfishes despite potential adaptive enrichment for scale-eating – Heras & Martin – PLOS One

Molecular characterization and biofilm-formation analysis of Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., and Escherichia coli isolated from Brazilian swine slaughterhouses – Santos et al. – PLOS One

Animal microbiome

Ecology and distribution of Leptospira spp., reservoir hosts and environmental interaction in Sri Lanka, with identification of a new strain – Sluydts et al. – PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases

Techniques

A simple kit to use computational notebooks for more openness, reproducibility, and productivity in research – Figueiredo et al. – PLOS Computational Biology

Bacterial concentration and Campylobacter spp. quantification differ when fresh or ultra-frozen samples are analysed over time using molecular biology and culture-based methods – Khattak et al. – Plos One

Robust inference of population size histories from genomic sequencing data – Upadhya & Steinrücken – PLOS Computational Biology

Rapid genotyping of targeted viral samples using Illumina short-read sequencing data – Váradi et al. – PLOS One

Improved assessments of bulk milk microbiota composition via sample preparation and DNA extraction methods – Xue & Marco – PLOS ONE

September 21, 2022

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Human respiratory microbiome

The Microbiota of Human Lung of Pulmonary Tuberculosis and the Alteration Caused by Anti-tuberculosis Drugs – Zhang et al. – Current Microbiology

Human urinary microbiome

Mechanisms of the intestinal and urinary microbiome in kidney stone disease – Miller et al. – Nature Reviews Urology

Human oral microbiome

Comparison of tumor-associated and nontumor-associated esophageal mucosa microbiota in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma – Zhang et al. – Medicine

Human gut microbiome

Differential co-expression networks of the gut microbiota are associated with depression and anxiety treatment resistance among psychiatric inpatients – Thompson et al. – Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry

Early fecal microbiome transfer after donor defecation determines response in patients with moderate to severe ulcerative colitis – Singh et al. – Indian Journal of Gastroenterology

[REVIEW]Modulatory role of gut microbiota in cholesterol and glucose metabolism: Potential implications for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease Atherosclerosis – Roessler et al. – Atherosclerosis

Landscape of the gut archaeome in association with geography, ethnicity, urbanization, and diet in the Chinese population – Bai et al. – Microbiome

Animal experiments (mouse/rat experiments, chickens/pigs on different diets)

Metabolic reconstitution of germ-free mice by a gnotobiotic microbiota varies over the circadian cycle – Hoces et al. – PLOS Biology

Inhibitory effects of antibiotic-induced gut microbiota depletion on acute itch behavior in mice – Zhang et al. – Brain Research Bulletin

RhoB affects colitis through modulating cell signaling and intestinal microbiome – Yang et al. – Microbiome

Animal microbiome (for animals in the wild)

Community and shotgun metagenomic analysis of Alligator mississippiensis oral cavity and GI tracts reveal complex ecosystems and potential reservoirs of antibiotic resistance – Perez-Marron et al. – Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology

Microbiome composition is shaped by geography and population structure in the parasitic wasp Asobara japonica, but not in the presence of the endosymbiont Wolbachia – Brinker et al. – Molecular Ecology

Plant, root, and soil microbiome

Mangrove microbial community recovery and their role in early stages of forest recolonization within shrimp ponds – Loiola et al. – Science of The Total Environment

[REVIEW]Current understanding of plant-microbe interaction through the lenses of multi-omics approaches and their benefits in sustainable agriculture – Diwan, Rashid & Vaishnav – Microbiological Research

Mitigating abiotic stress: microbiome engineering for improving agricultural production and environmental sustainability – Phour & Sindhu – Planta

[OPINION]Plant microbiota dysbiosis and the Anna Karenina Principle – Arnault, Money & Vandenkoornhuyse

Food microbiology

Anthocyanin Addition to Kefir: Metagenomic Analysis of Microbial Community Structure – Aydin et al. – Current Microbiology

Metabolic framework of spontaneous and synthetic sourdough metacommunities to reveal microbial players responsible for resilience and performance – Calabrese et al. – Microbiome