“…Over the last decade, highthroughput sequencing technologies have allowed researchers to explore microbial community assembly in the rare biosphere (Logares et al, 2012). Indeed, studies have been conducted in a wide range of environments, such as marine water (Logares et al, 2014;Wu et al, 2017;Mo et al, 2018), inland freshwater (Liu et al, 2015) and oil-contaminated soil (Jiao et al, 2017a). In oilcontaminated soil, the rare subcommunity is primarily governed by stochastic processes; meanwhile, deterministic processes are the primary contributor to the structure of the abundant sub-community (Jiao et al, 2017a).…”