Ecological and Evolutionary Implications of Microbial Dispersal

Abstract

Dispersal is simply defined as the movement of species across space and time. Despite this terse definition, dispersal is an essential process with direct ecological and evolutionary implications that modulate community assembly and turnover. Seminal ecological studies have shown that environmental context (e.g., local edaphic properties, resident community), dispersal timing and frequency, and species traits, collectively account for patterns of species distribution resulting in either their persistence or unsuccessful establishment within local communities. Despite the key importance of this process, relatively little is known about how dispersal operates in microbiomes across divergent systems and community types. Here, we discuss parallels of macro- and micro-organismal ecology with a focus on idiosyncrasies that may lead to novel mechanisms by which dispersal affects the structure and function of microbiomes. Within the context of ecological implications, we revise the importance of short- and long-distance microbial dispersal through active and passive mechanisms, species traits, and community coalescence, and how these align with recent advances in metacommunity theory. Conversely, we enumerate how microbial dispersal can affect diversification rates of species by promoting gene influxes within local communities and/or shifting genes and allele frequencies via migration or de novo changes (e.g., horizontal gene transfer). Finally, we synthesize how observed microbial assemblages are the dynamic outcome of both successful and unsuccessful dispersal events of taxa and discuss these concepts in line with the literature, thus enabling a richer appreciation of this process in microbiome research.

Rare bacterial biosphere is more environmental controlled and deterministically governed than abundant one in sediment of thermokarst lakes across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

“…However, deterministic processes (homogeneous and heterogeneous selections) also contributed considerably to shaping rare subcommunity assembly. For microbial dispersal, passive dispersal is one of the common mechanisms (Ai et al, 2013 ; Custer et al, 2022 ), which is mediated by wind and rain or by hitchhiking on other organisms and could be easily influenced by physical barriers, such as mountains (Prosser et al, 2007 ; Jia et al, 2018 ; Mestre and Höfer, 2021 ). The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is influenced by the East Asian monsoon, Indian monsoon, and continental westerlies (He et al, 2020 ), which can carry a variety of microorganisms and disperse across the QTP (Xing et al, 2021 ; Qi et al, 2022 ).…”

Dispersal of aquatic and terrestrial organisms by waterbirds: A review of current knowledge and future priorities

“…Microbial biogeography has been studied mainly in relation to environmental filtering (e.g., by lake chemistry), yet dispersal has become an increasingly popular topic for microbial research (Custer et al, 2022). Despite early work with microscopic algae, the lack of studies of microbial dispersal by waterbirds was clear in the earlier review of Figuerola and Green (2002), and the relative lack of recent research is evident from the resulting citations (Figure 2).…”

The core bacterial microbiome of banana (Musa spp.)

“…We found that eleven candidate-core taxa were not represented in field-grown plants, which could result from a range of factors. For example, glasshouses may physically limit the dispersal of environmental microbes [84], particularly from aerial sources, which may explain why the alpha diversity of above-ground compartments in field-grown plants was larger than in our potted plants (Additional file 1: Fig. S6).…”