Thursday, May 13, 2021
Humans have been harnessing microbial activity since our earliest efforts to turn barley into beer or grapes into wine.
But beyond the ecological theories at the heart of fermentation, engineering whole bacterial communities has thwarted scientists because of the unpredictability of nature itself - species move in, species move out: change is constant.
In findings published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution, a team of researchers at Yale’s West Campus have turned the tables on previous work to manipulate communities of microorganisms, also known as microbiomes, to perform specific functions by breeding them.
The question of whether groups of organisms respond to evolution as a collective – through so called multi-level selection - has been studied for decades, but with mixed results.