Environmental Filtering Drives the Assembly of Habitat Generalists and Specialists in the Coastal Sand Microbial Communities of Southern China

Abstract

Coastal sands harbor diverse microbial assemblages that play a critical role in the biogeochemical cycling of beach ecosystems. However, little is known about the relative importance of the different ecological processes underlying the assembly of communities of sand microbiota. Here, we employed 16S rDNA amplicon sequencing to investigate the sand microbiota of two coastal beaches, in southern China. The results showed that sand microbial assemblages at intertidal and supratidal zones exhibited contrasting compositions that can be attributed to environmental filtering by electric conductivity. A consistent pattern of habitat generalists and specialists of sand microbiota was observed among different beach zones. Null and neutral model analyses indicated that the environmental filtering was mainly responsible for supratidal microbial communities, while the neutral processes could partially influence the assembly of intertidal communities. Moreover, environmental filtering was found to shape the habitat specialists, while random dispersal played a major role in shaping generalists. The neutral model analysis revealed that the habitat generalists exceeding the neutral prediction harbored a relatively higher proportion of microbial taxa than the specialist counterparts. An opposite pattern was observed for taxa falling below the neutral prediction. Collectively, these findings offer a novel insight into the assembly mechanisms of coastal sand microbiota.

The environmental niche of soil bacterial, archaeal, fungal and protist communities differ along edaphic and topoclimatic gradients in the Alps

“…Instead, however, fungal and protist communities had the largest unexplained variance and edaphic properties played the most important role on the alpha and beta diversity of all groups. This is in accordance with other studies on microbial communities which have actually shown that biogeographic patterns among generalist microbial assemblages might be better explained by environmental conditions than for specialists, suggesting that environmental processes significantly influence all taxa and not only specialists [96][97][98][99][100].…”

Comparative analysis of diversity and environmental niches of soil bacterial, archaeal, fungal and protist communities reveal niche divergences along environmental gradients in the Alps

“…Instead, however, fungal and protist communities had the largest unexplained variance and edaphic properties played the most important role on the alpha and beta diversity of all groups. This is in accordance with other studies on microbial communities which have actually shown that biogeographic patterns among generalist microbial assemblages might be better explained by environmental conditions than for specialists, suggesting that environmental processes signi cantly impact all taxa and not only specialists (Székely & Langenheder, 2014, Lindh et al, 2016, Hu et al, 2019, Luo et al, 2019. Future studies could also explore how the environmental niche varies, within a same taxonomic group, between distinct functional groups (e.g.…”

Characterization and Performance of Lactate-Feeding Consortia for Reductive Dechlorination of Trichloroethene

“…In order to assess the enriching effect by lactate-feeding and TCE-supplementing, and explore the microbial community succession patterns during the enriching process, the indicator OTUs for these communities were classified using IndVal analysis with the R package labdsv tool [ 48 ]. Only OTUs with highly significant indicator values (IndVal index >0.95, p < 0.001) were considered strict habitat specialists [ 49 ]. Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) was used to visualize the β -diversity pattern of the microbial communities based on Bray–Curtis distance matrices.…”