A new tool of the trade : plant-trait based approaches in microbial ecology

We view the microbial ecology toolbox as containing many complementary instruments, and how they are used needs to reflect this complementarity. Next generation sequencing has exponentially increased sequencing depth, enhancing descriptions of microbial communities and discovering rare species and lineages that had previously been undetectable (Öpik et al. 2009; Gilbert et al. 2009). Microbial ecologists are also learning how to overcome the bias in 'culture-dependent' approaches, using genomics to elucidate functional roles and requirements (Mackelprang et al. 2011). However, by itself, next generation sequencing does little to aid understanding of the ecological drivers of microbial diversity and its consequences for ecosystem functioning and stability. Without the incorporation of complementary tools into these studies, as well as the use of appropriate experimental designs (Prosser 2010), microbial ecology will not move beyond an exercise in natural history and into a more predictive ecological science.