Fig. 5. Functional convergence depends on the type of function.

Microcosms with the same environmental conditions assemble communities with distinct equilibria due to historical contingencies (i). Core functions such as respiration converge in a common environment, in agreement with the common notion that function and taxonomy are decoupled (ii). However, our results show key functional differences in ‘auxiliary’ metabolic functions, such as chitinase activity or carbon source preference, are strongly coupled to community composition (iii).