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Assembly and Tracking of Microbial Community Development within a Microwell Array Platform
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Published on: June 6, 2017

Stochastic and deterministic assembly processes in subsurface microbial communities.

James C Stegen1, Xueju Lin, Allan E Konopka

  • 1Fundamental and Computational Sciences Directorate, Biological Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA. James.Stegen@pnnl.gov

The ISME Journal
|March 30, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Environmental filtering shapes microbial communities, with deterministic processes dominating in variable environments. Stochastic factors play a larger role in less predictable conditions, revealing general ecological rules.

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Area of Science:

  • Microbial ecology
  • Community ecology
  • Environmental microbiology

Background:

  • Understanding microbial community structure is key in ecology.
  • Deterministic and stochastic processes influence community composition differently.
  • A unified framework is needed to explain when deterministic processes dominate.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop a framework explaining the balance of deterministic and stochastic processes.
  • To identify factors governing the relative influence of these processes.
  • To uncover general rules for community assembly.

Main Methods:

  • Coupling spatiotemporal data of subsurface microbial communities with environmental parameters.
  • Utilizing phylogenetic composition metrics and null models.
  • Analyzing phylogenetic signal in organismal niches and community phylogenetic structure.

Main Results:

  • Closely related taxa exhibit similar habitat associations, indicating phylogenetic signal.
  • Ecologically similar taxa coexist more than expected by chance, supporting environmental filtering.
  • Deterministic environmental filtering's influence is maximized at environmental variation extremes.
  • Stochastic factors are more prominent in temporal turnover, though often not significantly non-random.
  • Deterministic processes dominate in highly variable temporal and spatial environments.

Conclusions:

  • Environmental filtering is a key deterministic force structuring subsurface microbial communities.
  • The relative influence of deterministic versus stochastic processes varies across environmental gradients.
  • General ecological rules govern these dynamics in both microbial and macro-organisms.