A new study has shed light on how bringing natural microbial communities back to life from frozen archives could have important implications for human health.

Published in the journal Nature Communications and co-authored by Dr Matt Lloyd Jones, the research offers new insights into how bacterial communities operate, and could help to harness the array of ‘ecosystem services’ these organisms perform.

To generate their data, the team collected hundreds of microbial communities from the natural environment, stored them in a frozen archive, and then studied how repeatably they could revive them. Read more about the process in this press release from Imperial College London.

Whilst the researchers focused on microbes that specialise in breaking down leaf-litter, the results could have far-reaching implications by using the same techniques to foster environmental microbiomes that benefit human health.

For example, healthy gut microbial communities could be used as probiotics to treat disease, or the microbes found in soil might enhance crop production and nutritional value.

Yet not all organisms recovered equally from the freezing process. Dr Matt Lloyd Jones explained:

“Although the microbial communities we studied were quite consistent in the level of functioning they achieved, there were important exceptions to this rule. Certain communities grew less predictably and we would need to understand this process more fully when choosing which microbial communities to store and revive.”

The research was a collaboration between experts in microbial ecology and computational biology from Imperial College London, the Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology, ETH-Zürich, Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Exeter.

The full paper is titled Replicating community dynamics reveals how initial composition shapes the functional outcomes of bacterial communities and can be accessed in Nature Communications at doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57591-2.