Microbial Ecology: Community Coalescence Stirs Things Up

Rillig, Matthias C.; Mansour, India

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.10.027

Cited by 30 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…In metacommunity ecology, such collective exchanges are referred to as mass effects (Leibold et al 2004, Souffreau et al 2014, Comte et al 2017). When previously distinct communities combine along with their respective environments, the reassembly of the novel community is termed ‘community coalescence’ (Webb 1976, Livingston et al 2013, Rillig et al 2015, Rillig & Mansour 2017). Microbial community coalescence occurs every time a leaf falls to the ground, a soil particle is blown into a new landscape, or two bodies of water mix.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Microbial community coalescence occurs every time a leaf falls to the ground, a soil particle is blown into a new landscape, or two bodies of water mix. Despite the ubiquity of microbial community coalescence, the formal recognition of this concept is fairly recent in microbial ecology (Rillig et al 2017; Mansour et al 2018). In fact, Mansour et al (2018) suggest that many experimental studies with microbial communities are unacknowledged community coalescence experiments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rare Microbial Taxa Emerge When Communities Collide: Freshwater and Marine Microbiome Responses to Experimental Seawater Intrusion

Rocca

Simonin

Wright

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Whole microbial communities regularly merge with one another, often in tandem with their environments, in a process called community coalescence. Such events allow us to address a central question in ecology – what processes shape community assembly. We used a reciprocal transplant and mixing experiment to directly and independently unravel the effects of environmental filtering and biotic interactions on microbiome success when freshwater and marine communities coalesce. The brackish treatment and community mixing resulted in strong convergence of microbiome structure and function toward the marine. Brackish exposure imposed a 96% taxa loss from freshwater and 66% loss from marine microbiomes, which was somewhat counterbalanced by the emergence of tolerant rare taxa. Community mixing further resulted in 29% and 49% loss from biotic interactions between freshwater and marine microbiomes, offset somewhat by mutualistically-assisted rare microbial taxa. Our study emphasizes the importance of the rare biosphere as a critical component of community resilience.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rare Microbial Taxa Emerge When Communities Collide: Freshwater and Marine Microbiome Responses to Experimental Seawater Intrusion

Rocca

Simonin

Wright

et al. 2019

Preprint

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“…Recent research has highlighted that co-invasions are very common in the microbial world [10][11][12][13][14] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Results from community coalescence experiments in single-batch anaerobic fermenters have been found to be consistent with this prediction 12 , and with the existence of correlated invasional outcomes. This latter phenomenon has been termed "ecological co-selection" 11,12 , to reflect that ecological partners in the invading community recruit one another into the final coalesced community.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cohesiveness in microbial community coalescence

Sánchez-Gorostiaga

Tikhonov

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Microbial invasions exhibit many unique properties; notably, entire microbial communities often invade one another, a phenomenon known as community coalescence. In spite of the potential importance of this process for the dynamics and stability of microbiome assembly, our understanding of it is still very limited. Recent theoretical and empirical work has proposed that large microbial communities may exhibit an emergent cohesiveness, as a result of collective consumer-resource interactions and metabolic feedbacks between microbial growth and the environment. A fundamental prediction of this proposal is the presence of ecological co-selection during community coalescence, where the invasion success of a given taxon is determined by its community members. To establish the generality of this prediction in experimental microbiomes, we have performed over one hundred invasion and coalescence experiments with environmental communities of different origins that had spontaneously and stably assembled in two different synthetic aerobic environments. We show that the dominant species of the coalesced communities can both recruit their community members (top-down co-selection) and be recruited by them (bottom-up co-selection) into the coalesced communities.Our results provide direct evidence that collective invasions generically produce ecological co-selection of interacting species, emphasizing the importance of community-level interactions during microbial community assembly.

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Rare microbial taxa emerge when communities collide: freshwater and marine microbiome responses to experimental mixing

Rocca

Simonin

Bernhardt

et al. 2020

Ecology

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Whole microbial communities regularly merge with one another, often in tandem with their environments, in a process called community coalescence. Such events impose substantial changes: abiotic perturbation from environmental blending and biotic perturbation of community merging. We used an aquatic mixing experiment to unravel the effects of these perturbations on the whole microbiome response and on the success of individual taxa when distinct freshwater and marine communities coalesce. We found that an equal mix of freshwater and marine habitats and blended microbiomes resulted in strong convergence of the community structure toward that of the marine microbiome. The enzymatic potential of these blended microbiomes in mixed media also converged toward that of the marine, with strong correlations between the multivariate response patterns of the enzymes and of community structure. Exposing each endmember inocula to an axenic equal mix of their freshwater and marine source waters led to a 96% loss of taxa from our freshwater microbiomes and a 66% loss from our marine microbiomes. When both inocula were added together to this mixed environment, interactions amongst the communities led to a further loss of 29% and 49% of freshwater and marine taxa, respectively. Under both the axenic and competitive scenarios, the diversity lost was somewhat counterbalanced by increased abundance of microbial taxa that were too rare to detect in the initial inocula. Our study emphasizes the importance of the rare biosphere as a critical component of microbial community responses to community coalescence.

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Microbial Ecology: Community Coalescence Stirs Things Up

Abstract: When methane-producing microbial communities are mixed experimentally, the resulting community is dominated by the community with the greatest resource-use efficiency. These results suggest a degree of community cohesion, or the maintenance of that initial community in the mix.

Cited by 30 publications

References 11 publications

Rare Microbial Taxa Emerge When Communities Collide: Freshwater and Marine Microbiome Responses to Experimental Seawater Intrusion

Rare Microbial Taxa Emerge When Communities Collide: Freshwater and Marine Microbiome Responses to Experimental Seawater Intrusion

Cohesiveness in microbial community coalescence

Rare microbial taxa emerge when communities collide: freshwater and marine microbiome responses to experimental mixing

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