Coordination and divergence in community assembly processes across co-occurring microbial groups separated by cell size

Frontiers in Microbiology

Microbiology

Yuhe Yu¹  Jie Huang¹  James C. Stegen²  Xinghao Li³ 

[1] Donghu Experimental Station of Lake Ecosystems, Key Laboratory of Aquatic Biodiversity and Conservation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China;Fundamental and Computational Sciences Directorate, Biological Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, United States;Hubei Key Laboratory of Regional Development and Environmental Response, Hubei Engineering Research Center for Rural Drinking Water Safety, Hubei University, Wuhan, China;Donghu Experimental Station of Lake Ecosystems, Key Laboratory of Aquatic Biodiversity and Conservation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China;

关键词: ecological process;    cell size;    high-throughput sequencing;    prokaryotes;    microbial eukaryotes;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fmicb.2023.1166322

 received in 2023-02-20, accepted in 2023-05-02,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Setting the pace of life and constraining the role of members in food webs, body size can affect the structure and dynamics of communities across multiple scales of biological organization (e.g., from the individual to the ecosystem). However, its effects on shaping microbial communities, as well as underlying assembly processes, remain poorly known. Here, we analyzed microbial diversity in the largest urban lake in China and disentangled the ecological processes governing microbial eukaryotes and prokaryotes using 16S and 18S amplicon sequencing. We found that pico/nano-eukaryotes (0.22−20 μm) and micro-eukaryotes (20−200 μm) showed significant differences in terms of both community composition and assembly processes even though they were characterized by similar phylotype diversity. We also found scale dependencies whereby micro-eukaryotes were strongly governed by environmental selection at the local scale and dispersal limitation at the regional scale. Interestingly, it was the micro-eukaryotes, rather than the pico/nano-eukaryotes, that shared similar distribution and community assembly patterns with the prokaryotes. This indicated that assembly processes of eukaryotes may be coupled or decoupled from prokaryotes’ assembly processes based on eukaryote cell size. While the results support the important influence of cell size, there may be other factors leading to different levels of assembly process coupling across size classes. Additional studies are needed to quantitatively parse the influence of cell size versus other factors as drivers of coordinated and divergent community assembly processes across microbial groups. Regardless of the governing mechanisms, our results show that there are clear patterns in how assembly processes are coupled across sub-communities defined by cell size. These size-structured patterns could be used to help predict shifts in microbial food webs in response to future disturbance.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Li, Stegen, Yu and Huang.