Aquatic microbial community is partially functionally redundant: insights from anin situreciprocal transplant experiment

Abstract

9Microbial communities have long been assumed to have functional redundancy, but very few 2 0 studies have tested this empirically. Here, we performed a time series in situ reciprocal transplant 2 1 experiment in two lakes with disparate trophic states to empirically test for functional 2 2 redundancy. We determined that the two lakes had different community compositions, and these 2 3 did not change even after incubating in a different environment. However, functional attributes 2 4were different between read-and predicted gene-level analyses of the communities, highlighting 2 5 the importance of resolution when delineating community functional relationships. Furthermore, 2 6there was a linear relationship between community composition and functional attributes, with a 2 7 broad range of similarities in the former and a narrower range and overall more similarity in the 2 8 latter, providing support for partial functional redundancy. Ecoplate analysis suggests that the 2 9 total metabolic activity of a community is influenced by its local environment, even though 3 0 broad functions like carbon metabolism are widespread. Together, our results support the 3 1 presence of resolution-dependent partial functional redundancy in aquatic environments. 3 2