Widespread Microbial Suppression and Functional Shifts in Wastewater Treatment Microbiomes Under Climate Warming.

A +1.5°C warming perturbation predicts declines for ~77% of microbial taxa in global wastewater treatment plant microbiomes, with keystone taxa also predominantly predicted to decline.

• Why it matters: Engineered wastewater microbial ecosystems are expected to respond to climate change, but their community-wide suppression, interaction shifts, and functional consequences remain unclear.
• What they did: A deep-learning framework estimated microbial responses to warming across global WWTPs, using predicted relative-abundance changes, reconstructed association weights, and taxonomically inferred functional profiles.
• The result: Warming is linked to decreased association weights in ~54% of reconstructed interactions, warming-associated viral abundance increases, broad functional shifts, and a potential methane-cycling imbalance.

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