Best practices in microbial biogeography: The 6W principle

Highlights

	● The ‘6W principle’ provides a paradigmatic framework for microbial biogeography.
	● Six key actions such as developing unified theoretical framework were suggested.
	● The 6W principle should be further refined by the whole community.

Abstract

A comprehensive understanding of microbial biogeography is essential to elucidate the mechanisms that regulate microbial diversity and facilitate ecosystem functioning. Here, we present a standardised approach for microbial biogeography research, using the ‘6W principles’ of ‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘Where’, ‘When’, ‘Why’, and ‘How’, to provide a paradigmatic framework for its study. The ‘6W principle’ we developed aimed to address the six fundamental questions in microbial biogeographical researches, including the taxonomic and functional identity, abundance and diversity, distribution patterns, movement or evolutionary trajectory, driving factors, and future changes of microbial communities. Some key corresponding actions were suggested to promote the microbial biogeographical research such as constructing high-resolution taxonomic and functional annotation databases, developing absolute-quantitative high-throughput sequencing, increasing sampling coverage, establishing multidimensional time-series monitoring, developing unified theoretical frameworks and advanced biogeographical modelling approaches, and establishing long-term global networking experiments. We call on the community to jointly enrich the connotation and coverage of the 6W principle, in order to promote the further development and exploitation of microbial biogeography in the context of ongoing global change.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

microbial biogeography / 6W principle / soil ecology

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Key Special Project of Intergovernmental International Science, Technology and Innovation Cooperation under the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2025YFE0103900), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Nos. KYZZ2023003, KYQN2023027), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42207349), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BK20221005).

Declaration of interests

There are no interests to declare.

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