Micropollutants and the Restructuring of Microbial Resilience in the Anthropocene

Environmental risk assessment typically treats micropollutants as individual toxicants, judged by acute toxicity and short-term responses, but microbial communities encounter them as persistent, low-dose mixtures that act as chronic selective environments across ecological and evolutionary timescales. This Perspective argues that such chemical complexity does more than shift community composition: by reorganizing microbial coordination networks, regulatory and metabolic investment, and ecological memory, it makes the community less resilient, changing how it recovers from, or reorganizes itself after a subsequent disturbance.