Selected by Editors: Microbial Community Assembly and Spatial Ecology (AEM Vol. 81(18)): Articles of Significant Interest Selected by the Editors from AEM

The principles and mechanisms that govern multicellular community assembly are incompletely understood. Haagensen et al. (p. 6120 – 6128 [doi: 10.1128/AEM.01614-15]) integrated high-resolution time-lapse microscopy with ecological spatial pattern analysis to characterize microbial community assembly and spatial organization. Their work revealed that small multicellular clusters can move, interact with each other, and fuse to form symmetric patterns of larger multicellular assemblages. Knowledge about microbial spatial ecology is central to our understanding of the structure and function of environmental, host-associated, and synthetic microbial communities. Moreover, the observed formation of primordial cell groups and their aggregation to higher-level structures may be a model for studying the emergence of multicellular life.