scholarly journals Environmental Filtering by pH and Salinity Jointly Drives Prokaryotic Community Assembly in Coastal Wetland Sediments

2022 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huang Yu ◽  
Qiuping Zhong ◽  
Yisheng Peng ◽  
Xiafei Zheng ◽  
Fanshu Xiao ◽  
...  

Understanding the microbial community assembly is an essential topic in microbial ecology. Coastal wetlands are an important blue carbon sink, where microbes play a key role in biogeochemical cycling of nutrients and energy transformation. However, the drivers controlling the distribution patterns and assembly of bacterial and archaeal communities in coastal wetland are unclear. Here we examined the diversity, co-occurrence network, assembly processes and environmental drivers of bacterial and archaeal communities from inshore to offshore sediments by the sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons. The value of α- and β-diversity of bacterial and archaeal communities generally did not change significantly (P > 0.05) between offshore sites, but changed significantly (P < 0.05) among inshore sites. Sediment pH and salinity showed significant effects on the diversity and keystone taxa of bacterial and archaeal communities. The bacterial and archaeal co-occurrence networks were inextricably linked with pH and salinity to formed the large network nodes, suggesting that they were the key factors to drive the prokaryotic community. We also identified that heterogeneous and homogeneous selection drove the bacterial and archaeal community assembly, while the two selections became weaker from offshore sites to inshore sites, suggesting that deterministic processes were more important in offshore sites. Overall, these results suggested that the environmental filtering of pH and salinity jointly governed the assembly of prokaryotic community in offshore sediments. This study advances our understanding of microbial community assembly in coastal wetland ecosystems.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas D. Youngblut ◽  
Georg H. Reischer ◽  
William Walters ◽  
Nathalie Schuster ◽  
Chris Walzer ◽  
...  

AbstractMultiple factors modulate microbial community assembly in the gut, but the magnitude of each can vary substantially across studies. This may be in part due to a heavy reliance on captive animals, which can have very different gut microbiomes versus their wild counterparts. In order to better resolve the influence of evolution and diet on gut microbiome diversity, we generated a large and highly diverse animal distal gut 16S rRNA microbiome dataset, which comprises 80 % wild animals and includes members of Mammalia, Aves, Reptilia, Amphibia, and Actinopterygii. We decoupled the effects of host evolutionary history and diet on gut microbiome diversity and show that each factor explains different aspects of diversity. Moreover, we resolved particular microbial taxa associated with host phylogeny or diet, and we show that Mammalia have a stronger signal of cophylogeny versus non-mammalian hosts. Additionally, our results from ecophylogenetics and co-occurrence analyses suggest that environmental filtering and microbe-microbe interactions differ among host clades. These findings provide a robust assessment of the processes driving microbial community assembly in the vertebrate intestine.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandra Escobar-Zepeda ◽  
Patricia Rosas-Escobar ◽  
Laura Marquez Valdelamar ◽  
Patricia de la Torre ◽  
Laila P. Partida-Martinez ◽  
...  

Abstract Objective Cenotes are flooded caves in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Many cenotes are interconnected in an underground network of pools and streams forming a vast belowground aquifer across most of the peninsula. Many plants in the peninsula grow roots that reach the cenotes water and live submerged in conditions similar to hydroponics. Our objective was to study the microbial community associated with these submerged roots of the Sac Actun cenote. We accomplished this objective by profiling the root prokaryotic community using 16S rRNA gene amplification and sequencing. Results We identified plant species by DNA barcoding the total genomic DNA of each root. We found a distinctive composition of the root and water bacterial and archaeal communities. Prokaryotic diversity was higher in all plant roots than in the surrounding freshwater, suggesting that plants in the cenotes may attract and select microorganisms from soil and freshwater, and may also harbor vertically transmitted lineages. The reported data are of interest for studies targeting biodiversity in general and root-microbial ecological interactions specifically.


Science ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 351 (6269) ◽  
pp. 158-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Metcalf ◽  
Z. Z. Xu ◽  
S. Weiss ◽  
S. Lax ◽  
W. Van Treuren ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua E. Goldford ◽  
Nanxi Lu ◽  
Djordje Bajic ◽  
Sylvie Estrela ◽  
Mikhail Tikhonov ◽  
...  

AbstractMicrobes assemble into complex, dynamic, and species-rich communities that play critical roles in human health and in the environment. The complexity of natural environments and the large number of niches present in most habitats are often invoked to explain the maintenance of microbial diversity in the presence of competitive exclusion. Here we show that soil and plant-associated microbiota, cultivated ex situ in minimal synthetic environments with a single supplied source of carbon, universally re-assemble into large and dynamically stable communities with strikingly predictable coarse-grained taxonomic and functional compositions. We find that generic, non-specific metabolic cross-feeding leads to the assembly of dense facilitation networks that enable the coexistence of multiple competitors for the supplied carbon source. The inclusion of universal and non-specific cross-feeding in ecological consumer-resource models is sufficient to explain our observations, and predicts a simple determinism in community structure, a property reflected in our experiments.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qing-Lin Chen ◽  
Hang-Wei Hu ◽  
Zhen-Zhen Yan ◽  
Chao-Yu Li ◽  
Bao-Anh Thi Nguyen ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Termites are ubiquitous insects in tropical and subtropical habitats, where they construct massive mounds from soil, their saliva and excreta. Termite mounds harbor an enormous amount of microbial inhabitants, which regulate multiple ecosystem functions such as mitigating methane emissions and increasing ecosystem resistance to climate change. However, we lack a mechanistic understanding about the role of termite mounds in modulating the microbial community assembly processes, which are essential to unravel the biological interactions of soil fauna and microorganisms, the major components of soil food webs. We conducted a large-scale survey across a >1500 km transect in northern Australia to investigate biogeographical patterns of bacterial and fungal community in 134 termite mounds and the relative importance of deterministic versus stochastic processes in microbial community assembly. Results: Microbial alpha (number of phylotypes) and beta (changes in bacterial and fungal community composition) significantly differed between termite mounds and surrounding soils. Microbial communities in termite mounds exhibited a significant distance-decay pattern, and fungal communities had a stronger distance-decay relationship (slope = -1.91) than bacteria (slope = -0.21). Based on the neutral community model (fitness < 0.7) and normalized stochasticity ratio index (NST) with a value below the 50% boundary point, deterministic selection, rather than stochastic forces, predominated the microbial community assembly in termite mounds. Deterministic processes exhibited significantly weaker impacts on bacteria (NST = 45.23%) than on fungi (NST = 33.72%), probably due to the wider habitat niche breadth and higher potential migration rate of bacteria. The abundance of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) was negatively correlated with bacterial/fungal biomass ratios, indicating that ARG content might be an important biotic factor that drove the biogeographic pattern of microbial communities in termite mounds. Conclusions: Deterministic processes play a more important role than stochastic processes in shaping the microbial community assembly in termite mounds, an unique habitat ubiquitously distributed in tropical and subtropical ecosystems. An improved understanding of the biogeographic patterns of microorganisms in termite mounds is crucial to decipher the role of soil faunal activities in shaping microbial community assembly, with implications for their mediated ecosystems functions and services.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document