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Updated: Jul 15, 2025

Assessing Biofilm Dispersal in Murine Wounds
Published on: August 7, 2021
Testing the contribution of dispersal to microbial succession following a wildfire
Kristin M Barbour1, Claudia Weihe1, Kendra E Walters2
1Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California-Irvine , Irvine, California, USA.
Importance:
Identifying the mechanisms underlying microbial community succession is necessary for predicting how microbial communities, and their functioning, will respond to future environmental change. Dispersal is one mechanism expected to affect microbial succession, yet the difficult nature of manipulating microorganisms in the environment has limited our understanding of its contribution. Using a dispersal exclusion experiment, this study isolates the specific effect of environmental dispersal on bacterial and fungal community assembly over time following a wildfire. The work demonstrates the potential to quantify dispersal impacts on soil microbial communities over time and test how dispersal might further interact with other assembly processes in response to environmental change.
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