Relationships between community composition, productivity and invasion resistance in semi-natural bacterial microcosms

eLife

Matt Lloyd Jones¹  Damian William Rivett¹  Thomas Bell¹  Alberto Pascual-García¹ 

[1] Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus, Ascot, United Kingdom;

关键词: invasion;    biotic resistance;    productivity;    microbial ecology;    diversity;    composition;    community;    bacteria;    None;   

DOI  :  10.7554/eLife.71811

来源: eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd

【 摘 要 】

Common garden experiments that inoculate a standardised growth medium with synthetic microbial communities (i.e. constructed from individual isolates or using dilution cultures) suggest that the ability of the community to resist invasions by additional microbial taxa can be predicted by the overall community productivity (broadly defined as cumulative cell density and/or growth rate). However, to the best of our knowledge, no common garden study has yet investigated the relationship between microbial community composition and invasion resistance in microcosms whose compositional differences reflect natural, rather than laboratory-designed, variation. We conducted experimental invasions of two bacterial strains (Pseudomonas fluorescens and Pseudomonas putida) into laboratory microcosms inoculated with 680 different mixtures of bacteria derived from naturally occurring microbial communities collected in the field. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing to characterise microcosm starting composition, and high-throughput assays of community phenotypes including productivity and invader survival, we determined that productivity is a key predictor of invasion resistance in natural microbial communities, substantially mediating the effect of composition on invasion resistance. The results suggest that similar general principles govern invasion in artificial and natural communities, and that factors affecting resident community productivity should be a focal point for future microbial invasion experiments.

【 授权许可】

CC BY