mSphere of Influence: Peering through a Keyhole into the Unseen World.

Sarah Lebeis studies the assembly and function of plant microbiomes. In this mSphere of Influence article, she reflects on how the paper "Functional Overlap of the Arabidopsis Leaf and Root Microbiota" (Y. Bai, D. B. Müller, G. Srinivas, R. Garrido-Oter, et al., Nature 528:364-369, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16192) provided a roadmap for how large culture collections composed of well-characterized bacterial isolates provide essential resources to test hypotheses concerning microbial communities.