Two types of organism have been shown to exist in cultures of the bacillus of rabbit septicemia, recently isolated from spontaneous infections. One, Microbe D, grows diffusely in serum and plain broth, forms rather opaque, fluorescing colonies on serum agar, and is highly virulent for rabbits. These characters are retained throughout many passages in serum or plain broth. The other type, Microb...

Microorganisms play a significant role in the evolution and functioning of the eukaryotes with which they interact. Much of our understanding of beneficial host-microbe interactions stems from studying already established associations; we often infer the genotypic and environmental conditions that led to the existing host-microbe relationships. However, several outstanding questions remain, inc...

Quorum sensing (QS) refers to the capacity of bacteria to monitor their population density and regulate gene expression accordingly: the QS-regulated processes deal with multicellular behaviors (e.g. growth and development of biofilm), horizontal gene transfer and host-microbe (symbiosis and pathogenesis) and microbe-microbe interactions. QS signaling requires the synthesis, exchange and percep...

The maxim ‘‘you are what you eat’’ goes only so far. The bacteria inhabiting our guts, which outnumber our own cells by perhaps 10 to 1, are commonly thought to reflect our diets. But other factors from geography to host physiology can also affect gut microbes, and sorting out their provenance is critical because they can affect our health for good or ill, from enhancing immune function to incr...

The genomic information of microbes is a major determinant of their phenotypic properties, yet it is largely unknown to what extent ecological associations between different species can be explained by their genome composition. To bridge this gap, this study introduces two new genome-wide pairwise measures of microbe-microbe interaction. The first (genome content similarity index) quantifies si...

A healthy soil plant continuum is critical for maintaining agroecosystem functions and ensuring food security, which the basis of sustainable agricultural development. Diverse microorganisms form a complex assembly play an important role in agroecosystems by regulating nutrient cycling, promoting growth, alleviating biotic abiotic stresses. Improving microbial coexistence may be effective pract...