Most attempts to identify the processes that structure natural communities have focused on conspicuous macroorganisms whereas the processes responsible for structuring microbial communities remain relatively unknown. Two main theories explaining these processes have emerged; niche theory, which highlights the importance of deterministic processes, and neutral theory, which focuses on stochastic processes. We examined whether neutral or niche-based mechanisms best explain the composition and structure of communities of a functionally important soil microbe, the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. Using molecular techniques, we surveyed AM fungi from 425 individual plants of 28 plant species along a soil pH gradient. There was evidence that both niche and neutral processes structured this community. Species abundances fitted the zerosum multinomial distribution and there was evidence of dispersal limitation, both indicators of neutral processes. However, we found stronger support that niche differentiation based on abiotic soil factors, primarily pH, was structuring the AM fungal community. Host plant species affected AM fungal community composition negligibly compared to soil pH. We conclude that although niche partitioning was the primary mechanism regulating the composition and diversity of natural AM fungal communities, these communities are also influenced by stochastic-neutral processes. This study represents one of the most comprehensive investigations of community-level processes acting on soil microbes; revealing a community that although influenced by stochastic processes, still responded in a predictable manner to a major abiotic niche axis, soil pH. The strong response to environmental factors of this community highlights the susceptibility of soil microbes to environmental change.

Summary• Understanding the dynamics of rhizosphere microbial communities is essential for predicting future ecosystem function, yet most research focuses on either spatial or temporal processes, ignoring combined spatio-temporal effects.• Using pyrosequencing, we examined the spatio-temporal dynamics of a functionally important community of rhizosphere microbes, the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. We sampled AM fungi from plant roots growing in a temperate grassland in a spatially explicit manner throughout a year.• Ordination analysis of the AM fungal assemblages revealed significant temporal changes in composition and structure. Alpha and beta diversity tended to be negatively correlated with the climate variables temperature and sunshine hours. Higher alpha diversity during colder periods probably reflects more even competitive interactions among AM fungal species under limited carbon availability, a conclusion supported by analysis of beta diversity which highlights how resource limitation may change localized spatial dynamics.• Results reveal distinct AM fungal assemblages in winter and summer at this grassland site. A seasonally changing supply of host-plant carbon, reflecting changes in temperature and sunshine hours, may be the driving force in regulating the temporal dynamics of AM fungal communities. Climate change effects on seasonal temperatures may therefore substantially alter future AM fungal community dynamics and ecosystem functioning.

The social amoebas (Dictyostelia) display conditional multicellularity in a wide variety of forms. Despite widespread interest in Dictyostelium discoideum as a model system, almost no molecular data exist from the rest of the group. We have constructed the first molecular phylogeny of the Dictyostelia with parallel small subunit ribosomal RNA and α-tubulin datasets, and we found that dictyostelid taxonomy requires complete revision. A mapping of characters onto the phylogeny shows that the dominant trend in dictyostelid evolution is increased size and cell-type specialization of fruiting structures, with some complex morphologies evolving several times independently. Thus, the latter may be controlled by only a few genes, making their underlying mechanisms relatively easy to unravel. TEXTMulticellular animals and plants display an enormous variety of forms, but their underlying genetic diversity is small compared with the genetic diversity of microbes. Eukaryotic microbes include a broad range of unicellular life forms, with multiple independent inventions of multicellularity. One of the most intriguing challenges in biology is to understand the reason behind the repeated occurrence of this particular evolutionary stratagem.The social amoebas, or Dictyostelia, are a group of organisms that hover on the borderline between uni-and multicellularity. Each organism starts its life as a unicellular amoeba, but they aggregate to form a multicellular fruiting body when starved. This process has been