Unraveling negative biotic interactions determining soil microbial community assembly and functioning

Abstract

Microbial communities play important roles in all ecosystems and yet a comprehensive understanding of the ecological processes governing the assembly of these communities is missing. To address the role of biotic interactions between microorganisms in assembly and for functioning of the soil microbiota, we used a top-down manipulation approach based on the removal of various populations in a natural soil microbial community. We hypothesized that removal of certain microbial groups will strongly affect the relative fitness of many others, therefore unraveling the contribution of biotic interactions in shaping the soil microbiome. Here we show that 39% of the dominant bacterial taxa across treatments were subjected to competitive interactions during soil recolonization, highlighting the importance of biotic interactions in the assembly of microbial communities in soil. Moreover, our approach allowed the identification of microbial community assembly rule as exemplified by the competitive exclusion between members of Bacillales and Proteobacteriales. Modified biotic interactions resulted in greater changes in activities related to N- than to C-cycling. Our approach can provide a new and promising avenue to study microbial interactions in complex ecosystems as well as the links between microbial community composition and ecosystem function.

Exogenous Melatonin Reprograms the Rhizosphere Microbial Community to Modulate the Responses of Barley to Drought Stress

“…It should be noted that drought significantly altered the β-diversity of barley rhizosphere bacterial and fungal communities, affected the composition of microbial communities, and caused changes in the metabolic functions of bacteria. Different microbial community compositions can reflect specific ecological functions and adapt themselves to environmental changes [ 52 ]. Drought has been reported to enrich several types of soil microbes, causing changes in functions of community [ 20 , 53 ].…”

Analysis of Microbial Community, Volatile Flavor Compounds, and Flavor of Cigar Tobacco Leaves From Different Regions

“…The development of omics technologies such as 16S rRNA gene, shotgun sequencing, and metabolomics have provided feasible solutions to identify species, genes, proteins, and metabolites in native ecosystems (Zhang et al, 2021b;Romdhane et al, 2022). These technologies have also been applied to tobacco samples.…”

Comparison of the Responses of Soil Fungal Community to Straw, Inorganic Fertilizer, and Compost in a Farmland in the Loess Plateau

“…The positive and negative correlations among species in the network can indicate the cooperative and competitive predation relationship among taxa. The increase in the proportion of negative links may indicate an increase in the negative interaction in the community ( 62 ), and this negative interaction between soil microorganisms may be caused by competition ( 63 ). A typical example of competition between species is the niche theory based on the “Gauss hypothesis,” that is, the same niche cannot coexist ( 64 ).…”