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Assembly and Tracking of Microbial Community Development within a Microwell Array Platform
Published on: June 6, 2017
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Environmental Selection, Dispersal, and Organism Interactions Shape Community Assembly in High-Throughput Enrichment
N B Justice1, A Sczesnak2, T C Hazen3,4
1Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA.
Applied and Environmental Microbiology
|August 6, 2017
Summary
This study introduces a novel method using high-replicate culturing to disentangle ecological forces shaping microbial communities. It quantifies how selection, dispersal, and interactions influence bacterial community assembly and individual organism fitness.
Area of Science:
- Microbial Ecology
- Environmental Microbiology
- Community Ecology
Background:
- Understanding microbial community assembly requires quantifying selective and stochastic forces.
- Assessing these forces (environmental selection, dispersal, interactions) in natural settings is challenging.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and validate a method linking microbial community structure to selective and stochastic forces.
- To empirically determine the contributions of immigration, fitness, environmental factors, and interactions to community divergence.
Main Methods:
- Serial dilution and high-replicate culturing (approx. 1,000 cultures) of a single groundwater inoculum.
- 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing to analyze final community structures.
- Most Probable Number (MPN) method to estimate cultivable abundance and infer relative fitness of operational taxonomic units (OTUs).
Main Results:
- Divergent community structures were observed across aerobic and anaerobic nitrate-reducing conditions.
- Analysis revealed the contributions of probabilistic immigration, fitness differences, and environmental factors.
- Condition-specific organism interactions and relative fitness were inferred for nearly 400 cultivated OTUs.
Conclusions:
- High-replicate culturing is essential for dissecting the interplay of ecological forces and taxon-specific attributes in microbial community assembly.
- The study provides a robust method for inferring interspecific interactions and taxon-specific fitness differences.
- The MPN approach allows estimation of cultivable OTU abundance in the original environmental sample.
