Every year each Nature research journal Editor reads many hundreds of manuscript submissions, and in so doing gains a bird’s-eye view of research trends. One of the most rewarding aspects of being an Editor at a selective research journal is that we can nurture, foster and help to grow emergent or multi-disciplinary research communities, by publishing key papers that shape those fields.

One way we can highlight fields is to convene collections of content that enable interested researchers, be they policymakers, educators or clinicians, to readily access the very best research and commentary across the breadth of a topic in one place. To support the growing, interdisciplinary community of microbiome researchers that are interested in nutrition, we are launching a joint call for papers in microbiome and nutrition, led by our Senior Editors who focus on microbiome research, Emily White from Nature Microbiology and Javier Martinez-Vesga from Nature Communications.

Since the 1800s we’ve been told that ‘we are what we eat’. Nowadays we understand that nutrition is multifaceted and highly complex. Nutrition is of vital importance to human and animal health. This broad discipline attracts practitioners in medicine, dietetics and clinical nutrition, public health, food policy and sustainable development. Microbiologists form an important part of this diverse network of researchers. Fermented foods have been produced by humans for more than 10,000 years, and interest in probiotic supplements for health or to treat diseases has been magnified by the multitude of links between the composition of gut or skin microbiomes and disease. It’s only more recently, however, that research into the roles of the gut microbiota in human and animal nutrition has been reported. For example, microbiologists have been disentangling the effects of the gut microbiota on nutrition in rodent models of human diseases, in human cohorts, and in livestock and poultry including sheep, chickens and pigs. To mark the importance of microbiomes in nutrition, World Microbiome Day 2023 has the theme microbes and food.

We are interested in submissions of primary basic and clinical research, systematic reviews, policy and best practice papers, and computational tools that tackle any aspect of nutrition relevant to microbiologists, including the microbial metabolism of food and dietary components, human and animal health and disease related to nutrition, including overweight and obesity and eating disorders, microbial foods and microbiome-based dietary interventions. All submissions we select for further consideration will be peer reviewed, and published papers from Nature Microbiology and Nature Communications will be prominently highlighted on our joint Collection page.

You can submit to our Collection by using the online submissions systems for either of our journals. Research papers will be read by one of our Editors, who will send selected articles out for peer review at either Nature Microbiology or Nature Communications. Published articles will be featured in the Collection and on our journal homepages. Editors from Nature Microbiology and Nature Communications will, with your permission, discuss any submissions that don’t meet the criteria for either title with a view to finding the best-suited journal for your research from across the Nature Portfolio. For example, there are microbiology Editors at our Communications journals, Nature partner journals (including npj Biofilms and Microbiomes) and Scientific Reports, which means that, with your permission and our transfer system, all articles submitted to the ‘Microbiome & Nutrition’ Collection will receive a recommended journal suggestion, as long as the science is sound.

We hope that a curated set of content will help to showcase diverse interests in nutrition research, serve to raise awareness of work carried out by microbiome researchers to the broader nutrition field and facilitate partnerships and collaborations among researchers from different communities. Our Collection will be accompanied by commissioned content including Reviews, Comments and News & Views, for example.

Our Microbiome & Nutrition Collection will remain open for six months. Submissions are welcomed on a rolling basis. We’re excited to read and publish submissions in this important area.