Some 3.5 billion years ago, microorganisms were the first to colonize Earth. They have gradually evolved, within intricate systems of microbial and macroscopic species, to occupy virtually all the available niches on the planet. Genetic drift and natural selection have molded the phenotypic expression of a trillion different microbial species [ ], shaping their metabolisms and offering ever-more advantageous abilities to expand, with the production of new metabolites being one key to the fitness and evolutionary success of new species [ ].
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