Our findings demonstrate that under multi-factor cultivation frameworks, ecological filters do not operate in a freely additive manner. Instead, intestinal origin, oxygen exposure, and metabolic context collectively constrain culturability, while carbon-substrate variation alone does not independently drive community clustering within nutrient-rich conditions. Together, this study provides a refined conceptual framework for interpreting culture-dependent outcomes and for designing multi-factor cultivation strategies in future swine gut culturomics research.
Chen et al. (2026) studied this question.