Rare microbes from diverse Earth biomes dominate community activity

Microbes are the Earth’s most numerous organisms and are instrumental in driving major global biological and chemical processes. Microbial activity is a crucial component of all ecosystems, as microbes have the potential to control any major biochemical process. In recent years, considerable strides have been made in describing the community structure,i.e. diversity and abundance, of microbes from the Earth’s major biomes. In virtually all environments studied, a few highly abundant taxa dominate the structure of microbial communities. Still, microbial diversity is high and is concentrated in the less abundant, or rare, fractions of the community,i.e. the “long tail” of the abundance distribution. The relationship between microbial community structure and activity, specifically the role of rare microbes, and its connection to ecosystem function, is not fully understood. We analyzed 12.3 million metagenomic and metatranscriptomic sequence assemblies and their genes from environmental, human, and engineered microbiomes, and show that microbial activity is dominated by rare microbes (96% of total activity) across all measured biomes. Further, rare microbial activity was comprised of traits that are fundamental to ecosystem and organismal health,e.g. biogeochemical cycling and infectious disease. The activity of rare microbes was also tightly coupled to temperature, revealing a link between basic biological processes,e.g. reaction rates, and community activity. Our study provides a broadly applicable and predictable paradigm that implicates rare microbes as the main microbial drivers of ecosystem function and organismal health.