“…Each of these studies, some explicitly and some implicitly, are searching for what has been termed the “minimal microbial community”, that is, the minimal set of organisms required to accurately reproduce natural community functions ( 16 ). The number of microbial strains in constructed communities ranged from under 10 ( 21 , 28 ) to between 20 and 100 ( 27 , 29 – 32 ), although some studies starting with a large number of microbes reported that only a small number of organisms consistently colonized plant sites ( 21 , 30 ). In addition to the loss of starting organisms, in vitro microbial communities commonly lose α-diversity over time, compared to their starting communities ( 33 – 35 ).…”