Dirt is anything but dumb. Inside soil lives a community of microbes that play an important role in everything from the environment to agriculture. In this Share Your Research talk, Dr. Julia Nepper describes her postdoctoral research to model and understand the microbial community inside the rhizosphere, the soil adjacent to plant roots. Dr. Nepper performed a series of experiments to understand how three key microbial species interact with one another to support each other’s growth and survival. These findings indicate that the soil microbiome is greater than the sum of its parts, and underscores the importance of modeling complex species