Environmental fluctuations reshape an unexpected diversity-disturbance relationship in a microbial community

eLife

Christopher P Mancuso¹  Ahmad S Khalil²  Clare I Abreu³  Hyunseok Lee³  Jeff Gore³ 

[1] Department of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Design Center, Boston University, Boston, United States;Department of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Design Center, Boston University, Boston, United States;Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Boston, United States;Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States;

关键词: systems modeling;    microbial ecology;    bacterial communities;    continuous culture;    Other;   

DOI  :  10.7554/eLife.67175

来源: eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd

【 摘 要 】

Environmental disturbances have long been theorized to play a significant role in shaping the diversity and composition of ecosystems. However, an inability to specify the characteristics of a disturbance experimentally has produced an inconsistent picture of diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs). Here, using a high-throughput programmable culture system, we subjected a soil-derived bacterial community to dilution disturbance profiles with different intensities (mean dilution rates), applied either constantly or with fluctuations of different frequencies. We observed an unexpected U-shaped relationship between community diversity and disturbance intensity in the absence of fluctuations. Adding fluctuations increased community diversity and erased the U-shape. All our results are well-captured by a Monod consumer resource model, which also explains how U-shaped DDRs emerge via a novel ‘niche flip’ mechanism. Broadly, our combined experimental and modeling framework demonstrates how distinct features of an environmental disturbance can interact in complex ways to govern ecosystem assembly and offers strategies for reshaping the composition of microbiomes.

【 授权许可】

CC BY